


Adrenaline

by radagastcar



Category: Fast & Furious (Movies), Fast and the Furious Series, The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Drama, F/M, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:33:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 32,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24529945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radagastcar/pseuds/radagastcar
Summary: After Fast and the Furious (2009), Dominic and Mia Toretto and Brian Spillner (formerly O’Conner) are forced to flee the country; they head off to Russia where law enforcement is inadequate and street racing abounds - if one is "in" with the right people.
Relationships: Dominic Toretto/Original Female Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	1. Adrenaline

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimers: I only own the idea, Blair and the fictional characters, the setting of The Compound, and I WISH I OWNED THESE CARS!
> 
> This story was originally shared on my Mibba in 2009 so forgive errors and my old writing style as I move it to its new home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Adrenaline by Gavin Rossdale.

Dominic Toretto emerged from the Boeing 787 with the haggard appearance of one who had been beaten down a few too many times. His muscular shoulders sagged with the weight of his heavy duffel bag and his sister’s regulation-pushing carry-on; his striking face showed every line of weariness one could hope to have. Perhaps it was the long flight - Toretto preferred to have both feet (more preferably, four tires) on the ground, in order to take the 24 hour flight from Ontario to Moscow he had been forced to pop a cocktail of Ibuprofen, a tranquilizer and as many drinks as the Flight Attendant in First Class (Toretto would not fit in the business class seats) would allow him. In the end, he had slept for nearly twenty hours of the flight, one of his finer achievements in life.

But he was in no shape to drive, and he hadn’t a clue where the mansion they had managed to secure for housing in Tver, Russia. Where Tver was in relation to the Domodedovo International Airport Toretto did not know, but he did know it was a long ass haul, and he did not look forward to being shoved in the backseat of some little shitty Russian rental while the lovebirds argued about the route.

“Spillner,” he pulled Brian (he had dropped the O’Conner when the force expelled him after his latest “stunt”) to his side as they approached the baggage claim, watching Mia pluck her bright blue suitcase from the carousel. “Where is this house and how are we getting there?” Toretto murmured, as he seized an enormous camouflage duffel bag from the claim and shouldered it.

“Well, uh, I don’t know that Dom, but I know that my contact will be here to pick us up.” Spillner also grabbed a big duffel, and a ridiculously large piece of rolling luggage.

“Your contact?” Toretto grumbled, angrily pulling off Mia’s last piece of luggage and his own large backpack. Shouldering that as well, the trio proceeded out to the front of the airport.

She was waiting there - Spillner’s contact - leaning against the side of a shining black BMW M5 Sedan, twirling her keys in her hand. She wasn’t very tall - topping out at maybe 5’5”, if Toretto had to guess - and she was slight of build, at least he thought so. She wore a long black coat with warm-looking fur lining, black pants and some sort of heeled black shoe; her hair was long and auburn (a color he would call candy-apple red if he were painting a car with it) and fell well past her shoulders, framing a pale, freckled face. A pair of dark sunglasses covered her eyes. She was a stark contrast to the white around her, a stark contrast to most people, Toretto expected. Though she looked nothing like her, he could only think of one name - Letty.

This was not what he had expected as a welcoming party.

The woman didn’t wave - a slight smile was all the notice she gave the party approaching her car. The trunk popped open and she offered to take Mia’s bags and opened the rear passenger door for her like a chauffeur. But Toretto could tell she was much more than that by the way she lifted Mia’s bags - one in each hand - with a practiced, muscular ease.

“Hey there you,” Brian began, but the redhead cut him off.

“Please, not here. Let us get into the car and be on our way.” Toretto was surprised at her accent - crisp and British, not the thick Russian he had been expecting. She smiled again as she assisted Brian with his bags; she attempted to do the same with Toretto, but he declined her help and set his hefty bags in the trunk himself. With a shrug, she closed the trunk and climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine of the BMW purred as she sped off into the bright midday sun.

“Welcome to Russia,” Her voice was deeper than Toretto would have expected, but with her accent he supposed she would have sounded prissy if it were any other tone. “I am Blair Hundley, Brian’s contact here in Russia. We worked together once - he got me out of a tight bind in the USA, so I decided I’d return the favor in the USSR.” She smiled slyly as she weaved in and out of traffic at a dangerously high speed. Toretto felt right at home in the Passenger’s seat, she drove like a pro.

“And thanks so much for that,” Spillner quipped, Mia’s head in his lap. She didn’t fly well either.

“Tver is a few hours from here; I wish that you could have flown in to a closer air port. You should probably get some sleep,” she glanced over at Toretto briefly, “It looks like you need it.” He grunted, slightly annoyed at how well she could read them - but then, he was hopped up on all sorts of tranquilizers from the flight.

Mia was already asleep, Brian was out like a light within a few minutes, but Toretto couldn’t settle his mind. He and Blair talked car for a while, he became impressed by her knowledge and her apparent ability under the hood. Her BMW, however, had no modifications, and even as such it was a 10-second car. Toretto found himself gaining respect for the German engineering under the hood.

“I normally drive Beemers,” Blair said as they passed beneath a low bridge in the outskirts of Moscow. “People give them a bad reputation - they are very good cars, and they have such smooth lines. Striking.”

Toretto nodded. “I like that,” His focus was out on the countryside, marveling at the small flocks of sheep, which stood hardily against the falling snow; Blair seemed to sense this and left him alone for a bit. “Where is this place?” He asked after a while and finally focused back in on conversation as he sobered up. Blair glanced at Toretto and shrugged.

“Another hour or so away. It’s on the other side of Tver, closer to Estonia and all of that. Probably closer than you should be to Finland, but that’s alright, their police force isn’t very vigilant either.”

“Tell me about it,” Toretto drained a water bottle in seconds, crunching it up and placing it by his feet.

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know where to start.” Blair sounded genuinely sorry, but wilted beneath Toretto’s menacing glare after a few moments. “Well, it’s a large medieval-looking mansion. The owners left it a decade or so ago, and squatters rights made it ours a few years later. The grounds are enormous, and they’re enclosed by this extravagantly tall wall -”

“Who’s we?” Toretto interrupted, as he drained another water bottle.

“My colleagues and myself.” Blair shrugged. “You’ll love the garage, I’ve heard. It’s underground -”

“No, you’ll have to do better than that honey. Who’s we?” Toretto tried again, a tone of anger in his voice as he crushed the second water bottle. He wasn’t good with secrecy, and this Blair seemed full of secrets. Even if she was cute, he wasn’t about to stand for it.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more than that until we arrive, dear sir. It wouldn’t be proper.” After that, she wouldn’t speak at all. Toretto lapsed into the silence that ensued until she informed him that if he had an iPod he could plug it in to the car’s system if he wished. He acquiesced, and stretched out as rap music blared through the speakers of the refined girl’s pretty little car. Perhaps he could annoy her into talking.

No such luck. It seemed she enjoyed rap as much as the next redheaded Brit; she only turned it down to inform Toretto, Brian and Mia that they would be arriving shortly.

Toretto sat up after this point, eager to see his new place of residence. He would need a new car, and German engineering wasn’t his cup of tea… Toretto’s thoughts were cut short by the sheer enormity of the compound Blair approached in the BMW. An enormously tall wall rose before them, a wrought-iron gate was flanked by two guard towers with armed guards in them.

“Only one way in. There are actually more than one mansion on the premises, and a few million dollars in vehicles deserves a determined guard, right?” Blair chuckled as her companion’s mouths dropped. Toretto turned to her angrily as she reached into the center console for what looked like an ID card - it had her picture, a bar code and a series of numbers, with a magnetic strip on the back. She rolled down the dark tinted windows and flashed the card to a guard, who swiped it through a small machine clipped to his belt and handed it back.

“Welcome back, Ms. Hundley,” He murmured, and bowed slightly as the gates opened before the BMW. Blair uttered her thanks and rolled up her window against the cold.

“See, they won’t even let me in and out without my card.”

“Who the hell are you people!” Toretto’s voice rose to a shout as Blair sped up, taking a series of winding roads and a few forks to arrive at a beautiful baroque mansion. The Brit ignored him, giving Brian and Mia the specs of the mansion.

“Presumably, it was designed by the same architect who designed the Russian State Library; our home is the largest on the premises. It has over 100 rooms, five swimming pools including a rooftop and underground pool, a cinema with a private bar, an actual private bar, a two-lane bowling alley, a sauna, a beauty salon, a banquet hall with two powder rooms, gold-leaf mosaics in several of the rooms. Most of the rooms are suites with their own bathroom and sitting room, some people opt to share suites - as I guessed Mia and Brian would. I took the liberty of choosing your rooms for you; you will find that the locations and the people around you might suit your fancy.” Toretto fumed as Blair spoke, he barely noticed as she drove her car into the underground garage, a two-story apparatus with parking spaces and their own little workshops if they so desired. Two men with bellhop carts approached Blair’s BMW as she parked, opened the trunk and divided the bags among them.

“Mia, Brian, Mikhail will show you to your suite, if you will please show him which bags are yours. Dominic, Kolya will gladly take your bags. If you will walk with me, I will explain all of this to you.” Blair pocketed her keys and pulled a box of black clove cigarettes from her breast pocket. “Would you like one?” She offered it to Toretto, who refused.

“Thanks. Just tell me what we’re doing here and get me a Corona.” Blair lit her long cigarette as she and Toretto climbed a flight of stairs up into the main lobby of the house. She led him through a few hallways to the bar, where he got his Corona.

“We are a Bratva of people like you, Dominic, people who have been forced to run from the law in various ways. Mostly, our crimes involved automobiles, but I have met one man recently who attempted Grand Theft Aircraft. Interesting, no?” As they walked up a flight of stairs to the second floor, Toretto fumed inwardly. He just wanted the answers, not the back-story.

“So what do you do?” Toretto asked, taking a sip of his Corona. If they were a Gang of some kind they could count him out; drugs, killing, extortion none of it was for him and he would stand for none of it, even if it meant he had to give up his safe refuge.

“We run cars. And there‘s a very high demand for Luxury Goods on the Black Market here.” Blair unbuttoned her coat, and for the first time Toretto caught a glance of a drunken trio of small blue dots in the webbing between her right thumb and forefinger. He knew them to be Borstal dots, which signified that the redhead had done time in a juvenile detention center in England. Lots of time. “I guess you could call us organized crime, but without all of the stupidity like running drugs - although there are a few of us that do that. If it’s your fancy, and you can find people who share that fancy, you and your mates can feel free to do it. This is a safe house.”

“So how do you get the money…?”

“We don’t, that’s the thing. Well, I guess some of us do. But squatter’s rights say we own this compound, and nobody in Russia is willing to say any different. The KGB doesn’t bother us because we could be a huge bother to them. Basically, we don’t exist.” Blair flicked her cigarette butt out of the slightly open window nearby. A man with a King of Hearts tattooed in blurry blue ink thundered past the pair, Blair nodded to him and spoke his name. Then they continued on their way.

“There’s only one problem with not existing. We get some interesting characters here. Come, I will show you to your suite.” Toretto followed her and wondered how Blair had ended up at “the Compound,” and what the king of hearts meant.

“So why are you here?” He finally asked after he trashed his bottle in a pile of similar items by a stairwell. The place, while not a dump, was not well cared for.

“Russia is famous for its inefficient police force, so when I heard the going was good here, I moved. England wasn’t good for me anyhow, I had enough shit to keep me locked up for the rest of my life - I was twenty when I moved here with the boys.” They approached a large set of double doors, and Blair produced a key from her pocket. “Here we are,” She unlocked the door and handed the ornate key to Toretto, who pocketed it and attempted to remember to put it on a chain or something later so as not to loose it. “I’ll leave you here. You can meet me later if you would like, my suite is just down the hall. Mia and Brian are just next door.”

“You’re just leaving me here?” Toretto had a bad reputation when it came to fending for himself; people had a tendency to get brain damage for a glance askance.

“I assumed you would like some time alone. Brian already knows the ropes here, so I thought he would have told you how to get along.”

“No, he didn’t,” Toretto grumbled and opened the door to his new residence as he wondered how in the hell Spillner would know his way around the Compound when he barely knew his way out of a paper bag.

“You know where I am if you need me. Look around a little, and if you’re really confused you know where I am.” She whisked away down the hall, a wraith with red hair and a black body.


	2. Bodies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Bodies by Drowning Pool

As she approached her suite and let herself in, Blair realized that she was instantly smitten by the fiery man she had just met. Toretto was a wild one, his reputation had preceded him to the Compound; he was a felon, convicted of jacking cars, semi trucks and a few gas trucks. But he had also taken down a major Mexican Drug Cartel, and seemed to be a good guy. Blair wasn’t used to meeting “good guys,” the only ones who lived in the Mansions were ones like the man with the King of Hearts - men who had been to prison and had been branded there.

Three days passed before Toretto finally knocked at her door, seeking her help. Blair had just climbed out of the shower and was squeezing the moisture from her hair when the knock came; she wrapped her towel around her middle and went to the door to unlock it.

“Oh my God, Dominic Toretto what have you done!” She exclaimed, letting the bulky man with the black eye and an enormous cut on his face in and immediately locked the door behind him. Blair went to get ice and a towel from her kitchen as Toretto explained himself.

“I didn’t know there were three of them,” Toretto murmured, helping himself to a Corona from the fridge before laying on the couch - when Blair placed the ice on his eye, he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Why ever would you attempt to fight someone anyway?” Blair rolled her eyes as she spoke; her image of Toretto as unpredictable had been right.

“I feel all pent up here. I need something to do. I need a car,” The muscular man looked at the little redhead and wondered why she looked so disappointed in him.

“I figured you could hold out a little bit longer until I re-stocked my garage. I sold a few cars to the Mafya here and haven’t chosen new ones.”

“Selling cars to the Mafya? Who the hell are you?” Toretto was unnerved by Blair’s calm smile, by how much it reminded him of Letty when she was up to no good.

“You’ll find out soon enough. I figured it was about time to upgrade the garage though; the stock was getting a bit old. So the boys and I re-enforced the cars with bulletproof material and some window tint and sold them to the Russians down in Moscow - they were about drooling over my babies.” Blair had a look of pride, as if they really had been her children that she had released into the world. “I have a few vehicles on… order. Some are harder to track down than others.” Toretto leaned his head back against the sofa, attempting to relax. It was nearly impossible for the huge man, so he watched Blair prepare herself a drink - vodka in a small glass tumbler with ice and a touch of olive juice. She slammed half of it down before she spoke.

“I’m going to go dress, ok darling? Keep yourself comfortable and keep that ice on your eye if you’d like to be able to see tomorrow.” She couldn’t help but chuckle at the big beast of a man laying on her couch with an ice pack on his eye and a piece of paper towel on a cut. She selected a purple high-waisted skirt with a black, ruffled satin shirt and a pair of black tights, topped off with black high-heels and her red curly mane. Blair rarely wore more makeup than a swipe or three of mascara and lip balm.

Toretto was surprised at her quick change as she emerged from her room.

“So let’s go downstairs and talk shop then, shall we?” She asked, drinking the rest of her tumbler and seizing her key.

“Do I get to see your garage?” Toretto asked hopefully, leaving the ice pack and bloody paper towel on her black marble counter top, he felt inadequate in jeans and a white muscle shirt as he followed Blair, who had donned her black trench coat as she closed the door behind them.

“No, but you’ll get to see more of the house garage.” They walked in silence after that point, Toretto had no more questions and Blair was not in a chatty mood. She was a strange creature to Toretto, with all of her couture and that devilish accent. He watched as she stalked through the winding corridors and clacked down stairs to the garage.

Even though she looked extremely out of place, it was easy to see that Blair ruled the garage beneath the Mansion. Men stopped their work to hail her as she walked by, and she seemed to know each one of their names. The must have walked past at least a hundred people (there were a few women mixed in with the large majority of men) on their way to Blair’s parked BMW. Each parking space seemed to be its own separate garage, and Toretto had a feeling Blair was taking him the long way around to show this fact off. So far, he hadn’t seen any cars he liked - there was no American Muscle and very little Japanese work, just a lot of European engineering. He wasn’t certain if he liked it or not.

“So what exactly are we down here for.”

“Easy, silly, I’m due for an oil change. Can’t have the lubrication thickening up on us, can we?” Toretto gave a start at her crude joke; he ended up watching as she set up her workstation, first she searched for an oil pan, a few quarts of new synthetic and a pair of coveralls, which she hung on the edge of the workbench.

“Just in case,” Blair winked as she leaned over to open the hood, surveying with her arms above her head like an old pro. “Ah,” She bent over to grab the dipstick, she displayed a good bit of leg to the seated Toretto, who groaned inwardly.

“Why did you bring me down here anyway? Watching you change the oil in your high-end ‘ultimate driving machine’ is so much fun…” Blair whipped around to face the muscle man, wiping the dipstick off on the dirty rag she had tucked into her waistband for the purpose.

“Have you seen Brian and Mia recently? Are they enjoying themselves?” She asked nonchalantly, turning back around and bending over delicately. Toretto nearly leapt out of his seat to throttle her, but somehow managed to keep a level head.

“Listen lady, I’m stuck here because of you; I’m in need of a little entertainment. If I can’t get a car from you then I’ll find it elsewhere.”

“And get yourself caught by the authorities? Isn’t that why your family moved itself here to begin with?” Her haughty British accent drove him up a wall. “I’m not here to entertain you, and you’ll get a car when I believe you’re good and ready.” She wiped the oil-coated dipstick clean again.

“Your oil doesn’t need to be changed.” Toretto growled, getting out of his seat as she turned to replace the dipstick.

“You’re correct.” Blair nodded, screwing the cap on the oil canister. She straightened to find herself face-to-face with a livid Dominic Toretto; he seized the hood of the car and slammed it down just centimeters from her fingers. She could see a vein pulsing in his bald head. He could see her subtly mismatched eyes - one forest green and the other tempest blue - and a completely calm facade.

“Who the hell are you to decide when I get a car? I can get one whenever and however I want - you said so yourself!” Blair strained against Toretto‘s massive weight as he snarled at her, the sound of a wrench clattering to the ground was heard nearby as a few large men - whom Toretto recognized through his black eye - gathered around the opposite end of Blair’s BMW.

“I invite you to walk twenty miles into Tver and jack your own piece of shit Saab or Mercedes from the eighties. By all means Dominic.” Blair twisted in his grasp, she managed to raise herself into a standing position. Her nose almost touched his chest as Toretto spun the dainty little Brit around, clasping her arms to her side. That wry smile again appeared on Blair’s face as she nodded to the hefty security guards, who winced in pain in anticipation of what they knew was to come.

Toretto saw stars as a spiky heel smashed onto his instep, attempted to grasp at his stomach as a bony elbow stabbed his groin, and felt blood trickle down his face as a backhanded punch landed square on his nose. Blair stepped pertly away from her victim as Toretto went down - he hadn’t expected such a brutal attack from the little thing, he felt almost certain her heel had gone through his foot and that his nose was broken.

“When are you going to learn that you’re no longer the king of the scene Toretto?” Her cruel voice hovered above him.

“Who the hell are you,” He managed, looking up at Blair while she attempted to staunch blood flow from his nose. She offered him a hand, her smile deceptively kind - at least, Toretto thought so. The muscle man glanced at the girl as if there was a feral tiger in his path, he contemplated whether he could run away if she tried to eat him.

“Come, I’ll have to clean you up again and straighten up that nose,” Toretto refused her hand, but she forced her help upon him as he laboriously pulled himself to his feet, he leaned heavily on his right side. Deftly, Blair slipped herself under his right arm to offset his limp.


	3. The Little Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: The Little Things by Danny Elfman

“What the fuck are you doing? Leave me alone,” Toretto grumbled, he feebly attempted to escape the arm that encircled his chest. He wasn’t able to shake Blair while they headed up the stairs, nor down the hallway, not even as she opened the door to her rooms - at that point he began to sway from side to side because his nose had yet to clot. Blair sighed as she led the giant to the familiar couch and allowed Toretto fall into the lush cushions on his own as she retrieved another ice pack.

“I feel like we’ve done this before,” She murmured, adding ice cubes to a zip lock container, grabbing a dishtowel as she strutted over to the dispatched giant. “I’m really sorry about that,” Blair offered the ice and a Corona simultaneously.

“A woman after my own heart,” Toretto quipped, taking both from her. He iced his face as she sat on the coffee table, pulling at his left boot. “Hey hey hey, what the fuck are you doing?” He yanked his foot away; Blair chased it and took it back onto her lap as she delicately unlaced his shoe.

“I have to see what kind of damage I’ve done,” When Toretto finally nodded in agreement, wondering how she could hurt him any more, Blair tore the work boot off his foot, evincing a wince. “Whoops, sorry,” However, there was no sorrow in the broad grin on her face.

“What the fuck are you laughing about?” He sounded pained, which wiped the smile right off Blair’s face - it seemed to slide right over to Toretto’s hairless mug, and he grinned broadly at her crestfallen look. “I’m alright, really. I don’t think a 90-pound girl could do that much damage.”

“You’d be surprised,” Blair murmured as she glared down at Toretto’s bare foot, which purpled rapidly in her lap. “Uck,” She quickly put an icepack over his enormous foot and set it on a throw pillow for more cushion before moving herself to the couch beside him, swaying like a cobra in front of him to see his bloodied and broken nose. Toretto sighed, removing the ice - he figured he’d rather cooperate than have a sideways nose on his face forever.

“Ooh, that’s a pretty good one. I’ve got to get that straightened out, and probably packed too,” The muscular man’s eyes widened at her proposition, he looked about ready to wet himself. Blair chuckled at his antics, and moved her hands to his face. “This is going to hurt dear. I’ll have you count to five very slowly,” Toretto grasped Blair’s right wrist firmly - the hand she used to hold his chin up against the downward pressure of her left hand.

“One.” He grunted as she began the excruciating downward pull to straighten his nose. Toretto’s enormous paw clasped tightly around Blair’s thin forearm, clamping down with unprecedented force. Blair gasped, but continued pulling until Toretto got to “FIVE!” With a mighty shove, Toretto sent Blair flying, onto the floor beside the coffee table where she lay for a moment and wondered if she might be seriously injured.

“Good lord Toretto, what was the meaning of that?” She asked as she propped herself up on her elbows. This time it was he who offered her a hand and lifted her from the ground.

“Who the fuck are you?” Toretto asked yet again, helping Blair wobble her way to the couch. She felt a little lightheaded and spindly-legged from her brief flight, and she sat for a moment with a hand draped lightly across her forehead before answering.

“I’m the woman that roughed you up and then fixed you up. I’m the woman who will - eventually - get you an automobile. I’m your ticket in here,” She looked up at him. Brian and Mia had already found their place among the Bratva; Toretto however was still holding on to his old ways, he hoped he would be able to come back as the king of the scene. Blair got to her feet and tottered over to the bar on her high black heels; she retrieved another tumbler and filled it similarly as she had before, the glass was nearly three-quarters of the way full of vodka before she added her olive juice and two carefully selected ice cubes.

Toretto wondered if she had a maid - and also if she was an alcoholic, he had observed the little redhead slam her half a glass of vodka back as if it were nothing and fill the glass once more before she returned to sit beside him on the couch.

“I’m Blair,” She smiled lightly; she balanced the cup on her knee as she pulled her long red curls out of her face into a ponytail. Toretto thought he could see the faint outline of a tattoo through her nearly opaque blouse, but looked away before she could reprimand him for being perverted. “And if you don’t mind my asking, who the fuck are you?” It wasn’t as if he hadn’t asked it of her several hundred times in the four days he had been in her life.

“I’m your worst nightmare,” Toretto quipped, watching the corners of her eyes crinkle as she laughed. A woman who could hold her own (he wasn’t about to admit his beating) was difficult to come by, like a high-end supercar Blair was an unprecedented treasure in the world of racing. Sure, there were plenty of bimbos, but none could match his Letty - even though Blair walked down the same path the little Latina woman had for Toretto.

“I’ve had worse,” Blair chuckled as she sipped her drink and regarded the bald man with eyes which danced and laughed. It wasn’t a secret that Blair was a sucker for the well-muscled type, especially those who would dress up nicely. But she hadn’t yet gotten a grasp on Toretto, and that made him dangerous to her.

“But you’ve never met better,” He laughed as he threw his head back with the depth and volume of the noise. Blair shivered before setting down her glass.

“So tell me Toretto, what do you plan to do with your life here?” She crossed her legs and leaned back into the couch, surveying him in her sharp peripheral vision. She didn’t notice anything she hadn’t the first time they met, just his lack of tattoos and the usual bodily decoration that was common on the men around the compound.

“I’m just here to get away from the government. Oh, and cars. I want to race cars.” Blair smiled wryly at his little jab. “Mommy please let me have one, please?” Toretto had a tired humor at this point, leaning against the back of Blair Hundley’s couch with an ice pack on his face and a damp cloth over his straightened nose.

“In two days my shipment comes in, I’ll have to oversee it’s… delivery, and then set the boys to work on my specific modifications. In three days you can have your car, darling.” Toretto sat bolt upright, looking at her with one eye swelled almost shut - he had the expression of a happy dog that had just pleased his master. Blair knew he was more of a wolf who was about to eat her whole.

“Really? And what do you have coming in? What kind of ‘mods?’” Blair sighed. She was concerned by Toretto’s genuine interest; she was used to working alone.

“It doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to race for a while, but it’s a car,” She filibustered as she climbed to her feet to carry the empty glass to the bar. “Corona?” Toretto shook his head, angry now at how easily she ignored his questions. “Well, if you didn’t look so terrible I’d suggest a night on the town tonight, but…”

“But what?”

“I don’t think any of the clubs would let you in, even in Tver.” Toretto glared at her, as if trying to get answers with his eyes.

“That’s fine by me, maybe if we stay here I can figure out who the fuck you really are.” He watched Blair’s eyes flash angrily over to him from what she was doing with her vodka. “Let’s take these cars, for example. Why can’t I just go ask someone else for a car?” Blair smashed the cap back on the bottle of Finlandia and shoved it into the freezer with vehemence.

“If you’d like a piece of shit,” She tipped back her glass and drained half of it before she answered. “Be my guest. But leave my apartment.” She drank the rest of her vodka; he noticed her hands shook. Toretto raised an eyebrow at her blatant rage, watching her hand shake as she refilled the glass. Again.

“Honey you’re going to have to slow down on the drinking there.”

“Who says?” Blair shot back, stumbling back over to the couch and plopping down with the quarter-full glass in her hand. Toretto reached to take it from her, but the semi-drunken redhead was still faster than he was and managed to drink the rest. Blair handed Toretto an empty glass as she giggled with satisfaction.

“Who the fuck are you?” Blair rolled her eyes at the question, but to Toretto’s enormous satisfaction and relief, she finally answered the question he had been asking her for four days.

“I’m the queen of the scene, and you’d best not forget it.” She threw her head back on the couch and giggled, inwardly surprised at how much vodka she had managed to consume in such a short amount of time. Reflecting on the effects of hard liquor on people, Toretto sat up, leaving his ice pack and washcloth on the counter while searching for a water bottle or something for the incapacitated woman. A hand on his shoulder both startled and confused the muscle-bound driver, almost as much as the head that collided gently with the middle of his back. Blair leaned against Toretto, her arms wrapped around his middle and her head between his shoulder blades.

“What are you doing there, young lady?”

“Not a young lady,” She muttered in reply, allowing him to turn around in her loose grasp. Toretto smoothed back Blair’s flaming red hair, he cupped her chin in his large hand.

“You need to go to sleep.” But her long black lashes touched her creamy white cheeks, telling Toretto she already had. He carried her to his bed - he reveled at how light she was, and what a lightweight she was - and pulled off her shoes and covered her small frame with her sheets before he took her key to lock the door behind him.

Strange motherfucking day.


	4. Millionaire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Millionaire by Queens of the Stone Age

Blair had been swimming in the heated pool on her floor - that much was apparent by her slight sniffle and the way she walked as if still submerged. Again, Toretto had managed to knock when she was fresh out of the shower - though this time, the Street Queen answered the door in only a white terry cloth robe, gathered modestly to hide cleavage. No one in the compound would dare mess with her and she knew it; this showed in her cockiness and lack of security. No one messed with Blair Hundley if they had two brain cells to rub together.

“And how are we feeling today, sunshine?” Toretto was always the joker, Blair thought as he let himself in after she unlocked the door. Another three days had passed - and as Blair had informed Toretto that her cars would be in and ready, so Toretto appeared on her doorstep again. She rolled her eyes at the tall bald man, slinking back into the bathroom to begin blow-drying her long hair.

Fifteen minutes later she re-emerged, her hair only halfway dried but dressed as nicely as usual. A pair of black skinny jeans hugged her thin legs, which ended in her usual spiky high heels; she wore one of her trademark silky shirts, this one in a subtle emerald green.

“What’s on your agenda today?” Toretto asked from his favorite place- the couch, with a Corona in hand.

“Glad to see you can help yourself there, darling.” Blair sauntered over to the bar, reaching for a glass before remembering how badly her night had been three days ago. “Fan-fucking-tastic,” Instead, she opted for a Corona as well, slicing a lime she had been saving in the back of her fridge. Blair brought Toretto a slice after forcing hers down into the neck of the bottle.

“How high class,” The big man murmured, accepting her offer. “But you haven’t answered my question.” As usual, he thought. It seemed to be the way they interacted now - he asked questions, she didn’t answer them, answered them in riddles, or finally answered after days of asking only when she was fully intoxicated.

“I like the re-growth you have here,” Blair said, after setting down the plate of lime slices. She ran her free hand over Toretto’s prickly-haired head while standing beside him - a head that pivoted on a muscular neck to allow the Californian to glare at the Brit. “Fine. The cars aren’t quite ready this morning, so I was going to take you in to town for some… body alteration.”

“What the fuck do you mean by that?” His brown eyes were concerned, his face crinkled in a way that made Blair laugh. She let her hand slide from the top of his head as she walked toward her kitchen’s counter, sifting through a stack of paper; and returned to Toretto with a picture of a bald man who was tattoo-less and a man with a buzz cut and tattoos.

“Can you tell a difference between these two pictures?” She asked, shoving them into Toretto’s hand and hijacking his Corona.

“Uh, I don’t have to circle them, do I?” Toretto joked. “So you’re telling me if I get some tattoos and grow my hair, nobody will recognize me?” He threw his head back and laughed, shaking the fixtures in the room with the volume of his voice. “Nice try, Blair. Don’t tell me it worked for you.” She tilted her head to the side, running her hands through her hair in an attempt to dry it faster.

“Well yes, it did.” She raised one hand to the buttons of her white blouse, which clearly exposed her arms

“What are you talking about, you don’t have any tattoos and that’s gotta be your normal hair color.” Blair simply shook her head as if to say ‘you silly, silly boy.’ She began to unbutton her blouse from the bottom up, taking her time and great care not to snag the fabric with her nails. “What are you gong to do, seduce me?” Toretto quipped, beginning to feel a little nervous. Finally, Blair shrugged off the blouse, standing before Toretto in just a lacy white bra - which wasn’t the only thing that made his eyes pop.

On her chest was an anatomically correct and labeled heart (how she hid that one in a towel he couldn’t hazard to guess), he could just glimpse a pair of peacock feathers stretching up her left side, the hint of a few words rose above the waistline of her pants and she had a small constellation beginning on her stomach. She had a tiny belly button ring, which glinted in the light from the window, which prompted Toretto to notice her over-pierced ears. Blair rotated slowly, her arm stretched above her head so Toretto could clearly see her peacock feathers - which were exquisitely done, he gathered. The nine planets stretched down her back on her backbone, in Technicolor; a tiny tree on her right hip had sparrows flying off to the left from it, above tiny text that he couldn’t read from afar.

“So how does all of that help you? Far as I‘m concerned, I‘ve never seen it, so it doesn’t alter your appearance.” Blair sighed, shaking her head as she scooped up her shirt from the floor.

“Silly boy. If you knew me from before I believe you’d understand. It’s addicting, you know,” She added, placing her shirt on her shoulders. Toretto bent to retrieve his Corona, trying to read the text on her abdomen; Blair noticed and drew his face up by the chin to look into her mismatched eyes. “Sorry, you don’t get to read that until you know me a little better.” She winked coyly and released him to continue to button her blouse.

“How much better?” Toretto asked, then added; “I’d still be interested in seeing Tver, even if I’m not getting tattooed.” He finished the last of his Corona and then reached for hers, wincing in faked pain as she batted his hand away from her drink. His face was still coated in bruises from the last bout he had with Blair’s ‘fists of fury,’ the black eye he had received from the three convicts was coloring nicely and the swelling from his broken nose had gone down, along with the pain of it.

“Keep your hands off my brew!” Blair swiped her beer off the table. “I thought you wanted a car more than you could ever want to see Tver.” She asked, sipping the drink as she plopped down on the couch - fully clothed once more.

“Tell me about it, then. Convince me I’m wrong.” The man was very hard headed sometimes. “Maybe you can give me my car first and then we can go in to the city?” Blair’s head turned toward him from against the back of the couch, and she raised one already cruelly arched eyebrow.

“Have you ever seen Prague?” Toretto shook his head, of course he hadn’t, what the fuck was she thinking - an American muscle car fanatic, see Prague? “Ok, well have you ever seen the movie Triple X? The one where he’s friends with the guy who jacks cars?” Toretto nodded this time, now coyly sipping Blair’s corona - she hadn’t noticed yet. “That’s Prague.”

“Oh. Then I have seen Prague.” Once again, Blair rolled her eyes at the muscle man, wondering if he would ever be able to assimilate with the culture of Russia.

“Tver’s like that city, only half blown-away and much dirtier. Less… social interest groups, we’ll call them, but more little Mafia things. Mafia Satellites.” She finally decided on a word, and noticed Toretto drinking her beer. “Fine. You owe me another drink anyway - let’s go into the city.

“No, I want my car. Then we can go into ‘the city.’” Toretto mocked the little redhead, his gravelly voice sounding quite comical while he attempted to be high-pitched and squeaky. Blair got to her feet and snatched her keys from the table before rooting around in a lower-leveled cabinet in her kitchen. When she came back into Toretto’s line of vision, she lobbed a stack of bills at his head.

“What is this?” He asked, smiling to one side as he inspected the stack. They were all smaller bills, fifties, twenties, and ten-ruble bills, but the stack was thick. “Where is this from?” He got to his feet, following Blair out the door.

“Well, it’s a little of what I earned from the deal with the Russians.” Down to the garage they went, climbing into Blair’s “traveling” car, a black Range Rover with dark tint on the windows.

They left the garage at breakneck speed - Toretto wondered if Blair knew the meaning of restraint when driving, which was quite hypocritical, as he knew nothing of the word himself. After a few minutes of driving, Toretto began to wonder where the hell this place was - did she have to hide her cars from the masses or something? But as soon as he began to revel about it, Blair took a sharp turn into a blind drive, and after a brief climb up a tree-lined hill, they came to the building.

“It used to be a Nuclear Blast Shelter, from what I can gather anyway. But now it’s all mine.” Blair sighed, watching Toretto as he began to judge the building.

“A little small for a garage, eh?” It seemed that it was a three- or four-car deal, but Blair had a knack for being deceiving from what he could gather. The thing was probably miles and miles underground. Blair laughed as they drove into the opening garage-style door; she parked the Range Rover in one of three car-sized lifts. Toretto watched with interest as the little redhead climbed out of the driver’s seat, closed the gate to the lift and held down a button as the vehicle began to descend. He couldn’t tell how far down they were - Blair’s arm had begun to hurt when they finally reached the end of the lift.

Toretto was forced to jog after Blair, who had immediately stepped off the rickety old lift and started walking in the pitch-black room. She smashed her fist into a button - invisible to Toretto - and he was nearly blinded by the lights that lit down the hall of cars in sequence. They were all black - all of the cars Blair kept were black with dark tinted windows; Toretto couldn’t help but laugh at the uniformity of Blair’s garage. The cars were all parked parallel in their spots - toward the back of the warehouse there were multiple lifts and workshop-like places where the cars could be worked on.

“Like a kid in a candy store,” Blair murmured, watching Toretto begin to inspect each car, moving on down the line after he had assessed each car. She perched on the hood of a long BMW M7, chuckling inwardly at the big man’s antics when it came to cars. He gave each one a detailed inspection, looking under hoods or even completely passing a car when it didn’t suit his fancy.

“I don’t like them.” He called finally, from the other end of the garage.

“You can’t find one car you like, out of thirty cars?” Blair laughed, as Toretto made his way back to her through the double line of cars.

“Well, most of these I won’t fit in, most of them are shitty little things like you guaranteed I’d find in town.” Toretto sounded let down - and he was, he didn’t think her taste in cars would be THIS bad. He was confused when Blair stalked down the line toward him, her heels clicking angrily against the concrete floor.

“Which is why,” She passed right by him, not even pausing to gauge his reaction. Toretto followed her down to the work lifts, where a car was parked beneath a long sheet. “I found you something I thought you would like more than European speed.” Blair leaned back against the stark concrete wall, motioning to Toretto to pull the cover off the car. “It’s not the type of muscle you might want, but it’s muscle at its finest, in my opinion.”

Toretto nearly threw out his shoulder yanking the light sheet off the long black body of the Ford Mustang - a Saleen Model. “Are you shitting me?” The look he gave Blair was nearly frightening, he threw open the hood and stared down at the engine in disbelief. “An Extreme?”

“Found it in a shipment from America, difficult to get over here. It’s an ‘08 S302, 620 horses and it’s only a V8. Impressive, I thought, and I had to have it. It’s going to draw a bit of unwanted attention, however…” Blair saw that her information was lost upon Toretto, who was climbing into the driver’s seat, trying to find how to start the engine without a key. “Darling, it’s a keyless. Put your foot on the brake and press the button.” The engine roared to life, Blair smiled as she approached the driver’s side window.

“Take me into town?” She asked, smiling wryly.

Toretto was all too happy to comply.


	5. A Little Piece of Heaven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: A Little Piece of Heaven by Avenged Sevenfold

Toretto liked the way the American leather steering weather felt beneath his callused palm, the way the seat was just big enough for his enormous body to fit in. He liked the music Blair had chosen, and what she had said while flipping through her iPod.

“If the music slows down, I slow down. The only way to sabotage me during a race would be to change the music on my iPod.” Then she laughed, set the coordinates of the Compound into the big DVD GPS and relaxed into the seat, watching Toretto as he drove. She could tell he treated cars as he treated his women - like Goddesses. The thought made her laugh.

“What’s your problem?” Toretto asked, looking to the Brit - who’s laughing face was illuminated by the distant sunset. She shook her red-haired head, disinclined to answer such a stupid question - and then laughed again at the thought. The bald man beside her gave her a second glance, wondering if he just received a car from a crazy woman. But it wasn’t a surprising or shocking revelation.

The unlikely companions were on their way back from the city - Blair had taken Toretto drinking and then convinced him to get tattoo following some liquid encouragement. It had started as a memorial to Letty, and moved on to be a much bigger monster - race flags, spark plugs, grinning skulls, the works. Blair had been proud of the spider web the artist had begun on his elbow; the girl could sweet-talk her way into anything, a trait of which she was extremely proud. The downside with negotiation was that one had to give a little to get a little.

“My elbow hurts,” Toretto complained as he turned into the Compound, stretching the plastic covering the tattoo artist had taped over his elbow. Blair flashed her ID from inside the Mustang, and they drove onward, toward the house.

“Yeah, well I feel cliché, so don’t complain.” The Brit sighed, wondering why she had let herself drink so much as to allow Toretto to talk her into things. The muscled man shook his head, wondering why Blair drank so much, period. But he couldn’t fault her - it wasn’t as if she had it truly easy or anything, living as the street queen and all - and she did have wonderful taste in vehicles, come to think of it. She hadn’t mentioned racing yet, and the thought of Toretto’s one true love weighed heavily on his mind as they pulled into the long drive, parking where Blair’s Range Rover (the one she left unceremoniously parked on one of the lifts in her garage) had been, beside her beloved M5.

Toretto had noticed that Blair was quite knowledgeable about her cars, a trait he enjoyed in women. She was growing on him, he realized as he watched her stalk up the stairs in her high heels, looking regal even with a piece of black garbage bag strapped to her elbow. She turned at the top stair, looking down at him.

“Well come on then, we need to talk racing.” She winked, and continued onward to the bar as Toretto raced up the stairs behind her, nearly knocking into her back as she asked the man who stood behind the bar (he was no bar tender) for two Coronas with Lime. Toretto couldn’t help the pang of jealousy he felt, watching her flirt with the other man. Blair reveled in the smile Toretto gave her as she instructed him, bossy as always. “I’m all out up in my apartments, so maybe you could carry up a case?” Toretto grunted a reply and retrieved the heavy cases from behind the bar, carrying one in each hand.

“Only because I need my Corona,” He commented, once again following Blair as she carried his beer - it was like a carrot to him, he worked for the Corona. Not only that, but Toretto wanted to race, especially after Blair had presented him with the Saleen Mustang. The car was an aphrodisiac for him, he wanted to race like most men wanted pussy.

This led him to thinking of his sister and the Buster. Where had they been? Blair seemed to know everything about them - she had hinted that they had found their own circle while he had not, and she had also alleged that she had given them vehicles before Toretto. But he couldn’t hold that against Ms. Hundley, after all, a Saleen S302 was more than enough to pardon her for whatever wrongs she had done him in the past; the enormous stack of money was even more incentive to do just that.

“Paging Dr. Dominic, please report back to Blair,” Her low voice shattered Toretto’s train of thought - she held the door open with a spiky heel, clutching two beers by their necks and a brace of limes in the other. He turned sideways to fit through the door, feeling like a pack mule. She directed him to the fridge, showed him where to set the enormous cases and then handed him his beer, patting him on the back before setting to work; she opened one case and dispersed it through her fridge, setting the lemons on the top shelf of the enormous stainless-steel apparatus.

“What are you thinking about there, darling?” Blair finally perched on the ottoman opposite Dominic’s customary place on the couch - she skimmed the top of his head with her hand as she made her way there.

“What? Oh.” Blair shook her head at his reaction, sipping delicately out of her bottle. Truthfully, Toretto had been fantasizing about the race; the best ten seconds of his life - well, cumulatively all of his races had been hours, but less than ten seconds for a ¼ mile was the norm. “I thought we were going to talk racing.”

“Is that all you ever think about? Never ‘Hey, let me tell you about California,’ or ‘I miss my sister,’” Blair mocked him so often and so easily it must have become her most favorite pastime. “Hell, even a ‘you look nice today Blair’ would suffice,” Her thick British accent had the capability of sounding refined and high-class, or cockney and rude. It was the latter as she spoke, tearing into Toretto with words. Hey, he was acting strange, so she was allowed to be cruel and unusual.

“You look nice today, Blair. Now talk to me about racing.” Blair felt disinclined to answer the second demand and stood, rummaging for a candle in one of the kitchen drawers. The place smelled a little funky - like skunky beer, and there was no question as to why. The candle she lit smelled of honeydew and melon, and compared to the rest of the room it immediately began to overpower Toretto’s nose.

“What could I possible tell you about racing, weren’t you the king of streets in Cali or something?” She finally spoke after cutting another lime - if there was one thing about Blair that bothered Toretto it was how she could either filibuster her way around answering a question or just flat out ignore it altogether.

“My God Blair, are you being serious?” Toretto was on his feet and hadn’t even realized it in his anger. Before Blair could even think of moving, Toretto had closed the distance between them, and a burly arm on either side of the dainty redhead cut off her escape. Somehow she remained looking innocent, even a little bit intimidated - but never frightened.

“I thought you were happy with your car,” She shrugged, trying to duck out from under his arms; but Toretto instead grasped her by the shoulders. “What the fuck are you doing, Toretto?” She asked, her voice harsh and low. “Let me go.”

“Let me race.” His deep, gravelly voice was frightening at best, and the way he used it was vicious and cutting.

“No, Toretto, you’re still too high profile. People on the streets will know who you are, even if you don’t.” The words hurt the muscle man.

“You’re afraid,” Toretto let her go, crossing the room again to lean against the opposite wall. Blair followed him, her heels clicking lightly.

“Afraid? What do I have to be afraid of from you?” She asked, hot on his heels. Suddenly, she paused. “Oh, I see. You think you’re better than I am. Is that it? You have to prove yourself to be able to fit in, is that it, Dominic?” Her voice never raised above a normal conversational tone, even as Toretto shouted back.

“Yes! That’s it, Blair, I have to prove myself to you! You’ve hit the nail on the head there!” He smashed his beer bottle on the dark-wood of the dresser beside him; it shattered and sent glass and sticky liquid flying everywhere.

“What have you done!” Blair cried out, watching as one of her favorite pieces was ruined. Without hesitation, she cocked her arm back and threw her own bottle at his head; he ducked and it shattered against the white wall. Toretto rushed to her, pinning her arms to her side before the candle could join the beer bottle.

“What the fuck are you doing Blair! Are you insane?” She sunk down to her knees on the floor, and then sat, her head leaning against the island of the kitchen. Toretto sunk with her, making a grab for the candle - which had gone out and was shedding its green wax all over Blair’s hard wood floors - but she let it fall out of her hands - it rolled to the fridge, and there it stopped with a clunk.

“Why would you be afraid?” His voice had softened as he held Blair’s face in both hands, wondering why the hell she would be crying over something as stupid as letting him start racing again. The Ice Queen of the Scene had tears welling in her mismatched eyes. Toretto wiped them away with his big thumbs, waiting for an answer. Her delicate hands reached to grasp his calloused ones, her fingers hooking between his thumb and forefinger as she spoke.

“Because if you get caught, we all go down, and there’s not a chance in hell that I’m going back to fucking prison,” Toretto’s glance flickered downward to the trio of blueish dots on her hand, remembering that she had done time and served to do much more.

“Now that’s a sentiment I can understand.” Toretto sat and pulled Blair’s small frame into his lap. “But what makes you think I would get caught? Why so definite?” Blair closed her eyes and nestled her face in the space between Dominic’s collarbone and chin.

“Because it’s my gut feeling.” She shook her head lightly; Toretto reveled in the clean scent of her hair. “Whenever I go against it, bad things happen.” Blair put both hands on the counter top and pulled herself out of his lap.

“So it’s not going to happen yet, Toretto.” She poured herself a glass of water - in a plastic cup - and downed it, refilled it, and did it again before Toretto rose to stand behind her. Blair dropped the cup as he breathed in her hair - tremendously startled.

“What if I promise not to misbehave?” His gravelly voice was quiet in her ear, how he had gotten so close to him she couldn’t even guess.

“Toretto. I know you can’t help it.” His black eye had gone down, but she knew he remembered it. She felt his lips meet her cheek, and she slammed her cup down on the counter top - hard.

“Flattery isn’t going to work, Dominic! I’m not letting you race and that’s the end of it! Now leave. Me. In. Peace!” She faced forward, not daring to meet his chocolate eyes, and only turned around when she heard the door slam.

Rough fucking night.


	6. Velvet Touch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter summary: Velvet Touch by The 69 Eyes

He kept seeing Blair’s face around every corner; when he went to go swimming in the pool, to work on his new car, to retrieve a new case of Corona from the bar… she was there. She had a knack for preceding him; she could read him like a book. The mismatched gaze pierced him to the core.

Toretto wasn’t certain why he was avoiding Blair anymore; since he had stormed out two days ago, he hadn’t once woken up sober. This was what happened when he tried to tell women how he felt about them - he thought, shaking his head as he swigged the Corona which had become permanently attached to his spider-webbed arm - they ignored him, they kicked them out of their homes. It hadn’t happened with Letty, but perhaps Letty was less of a girl than normal women were; she was less… dramatic. Toretto drained the bottle and tossed it atop a growing pile in the corner of his living room, the one place he could count on Blair NOT showing up.

Blair, meanwhile, had busied herself organizing nightly racing trips into Moscow and St. Petersburg with her team - a few good racers she had taught from scratch. Papers were necessary for such distant forays - anything outside of Tver required a false identity. They also required a truck for transportation, she was not about to let a group of convicts off the hook on a five-hour trip into St. Petersburg with her own hard-earned cars, and some of the cars were too delicate to be left to the overly offensive driving maneuvers of the boys on an autobahn. Being so busy allowed her to forget about Toretto - minus the fact that she kept running into him, and pined to ride in the car she had given him once more. She could claim she hated him all she wanted, but it was of little use; try all she might, there was no forgetting Dominic Toretto. Especially not when she and Mia had become the best of girlfriends - Mia was a dab hand with the scissors and had offered to cut Blair’s severely misshapen mop, and in return Blair had invited her over for ‘girlfriend’ nights - nail painting, cosmopolitans (the drink AND the magazine!), naked pillow fights, the works.

Mia, Blair noted, was just as hard headed as her brother was but with less of a temper and no need for speed at all. Blair had given her a Volkswagen Jetta TDI for transportation purposes, for Mia was no racer. She enjoyed the vehicle as much as Dominic had though, and had taken Brian into Tver that same night. Brian wanted to race, but hadn’t the need like Dominic did. He was happy with the leisure that living in the Compound brought, the time he was able to spend with Mia because he wasn’t looking after Dominic or busting random drug dealers and other criminals. Luckily, it was not known that Spillner had been a narc, and Blair was working hard to keep it that way.

“Why does he need to race?” Blair asked Mia as they tanned in the downstairs parlor in the salon that had become their territory. There were very few other women in the Compound, and even fewer were interested in keeping up their appearances as the pair were.

“What do you mean?” Mia’s timer clicked, and she climbed out of the tanning bed naked (avoiding tan lines), stretching for her lush white robe. Blair was already swathed in hers, she was too pale to stay in the beds for as long as Mia’s dark skin required.

“Dominic. He seemed so upset when I told him that he could have a car, but he can’t race until the heat is off.” Blair shrugged, reaching to lotion her legs.

“Have you ever heard of the book ‘If you give a Pig a Pancake?’?” Blair shook her head, no, she hadn’t, and she didn’t read books with such crappy titles. “It must be just an American thing, then. But it’s a children's book, and it’s big in SoCal. But its whole thing is if you keep giving the pig stuff, he’ll want more and more stuff to go with it. Like, ‘If you give a Pig a Pancake, he’s going to want Butter to put on it.’ Stuff like that. ‘Cept my brother is the pig in this instance.”

Blair burst out laughing; Mia had just called her own brother a pig, something the girl wouldn’t normally do. Realizing her mistake, Mia laughed as well, braiding her smooth brown hair over one shoulder.

“He’ll learn to live with it eventually, but you can’t keep it from him forever. The boy’s got NOS in is blood,” Blair nodded.

“I can sympathize with that, but I fail to see why he doesn’t just go with the flow - or get that he can’t race for a little while. At least until his hair gets a little longer.” Blair was glad he had stopped shaving his head at this point; someone had tipped him off to the fact that his clean-shaven look was very distinctive, and even with a little bit of stubble he looked radically different. She glanced at her cell phone for the time.

“Ah, shit, Mia, I have to get moving, we have a trip out to St. Petersburg tonight.” Blair jumped into her clothes and embraced her friend. As she was leaving the tanning beds, Mia grabbed her hand.

“Blair. Take him with you. He doesn’t have to race, just take him with you.” Mia’s big brown eyes were pleading, so Blair embraced her again.

“I’ll think about it.” As she swept up the staircase to her apartments, Blair found met one of her racers on the steps. “Get me Dominic Toretto,” She asked quietly, and then proceeded to her apartments. She was drying her hair after a shower fifteen minutes later when he finally knocked on her door.

“Wait.” She called, slipping into her outfit for the evening, a short emerald dress and black tights - she wasn’t racing, so what did it matter what she wore? Blair finished pulling her hair straight, and pulled her mascara brush through her long eyelashes, then walked to her door, heels in hand.

“Come in, Toretto,” Blair hadn’t meant to sound harsh, but it was the way the words had come out. She closed and locked the door behind him, and perched on the cold black countertop of her kitchen to put on her heels. “There’s something I’d like to ask you.” She watched him out of her peripheral vision; he retrieved a new Corona and placed a lime in it.

“But you’re drunk! Dominic Toretto, put that beer back this instant!”

“Don’t you be bossing me around; my last drink was hours ago.” Blair sighed, slipping her second black high-heeled shoe before she slid off the countertop, walking over to Toretto. “I was going to let you come with us tonight, but only if you sober up in the next hour.” It took Dominic a minute to get what she had said, but he handed her his beer and walked over to the kitchen counter to stick his entire head under the faucet, mouth open, water on the coldest setting.

“That’s effective,” Blair poured out the beer beside his head, sucking on the lime as she trashed the bottle. She had cleaned up from their soiree the other night, and had since installed a newer, bigger garbage can so that the ’broken-bottle incident’ didn’t happen again. Even though it had nothing to do with trashcans or lack thereof, but it was a comfort knowing that it was nearby. She sat on the countertop by the sink, waiting for Dominic to finish his impromptu shower so she could hand him a towel and explain the agenda for the night.

Finally, he pulled his head from beneath the faucet, his hand reaching toward her for the towel she held. He rubbed it through his short growth of hair - Blair spied his elbow, and noticed that he was taking good care of the tattoo even in his drunken stupor.

“Well?” He asked through the towel, looking up at Blair though he could not see her.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to take the drive there, but we’re going to St. Petersburg tonight. You won’t be racing, but I’m willing to take the risk at your sister’s sincere request.”

“Mia told you to take me tonight? This isn’t out of the kindness of your heart?” Toretto slapped the countertop with the towel as he leaned against the island, gazing up at Blair.

“Both, actually; I wouldn’t have honored her request if it wasn’t for the kindness of my heart. So will you be sober enough by then to drive?” They still had to get all of the cars on the trailer and the racing wouldn’t start until the small hours of the morning, but Blair liked to be a little bit early. The racers all gathered in the same place every single time - an old parking garage - and people got there well before the usual start time.

“When do we leave?”

“In an hour or so.”

He accompanied Blair downstairs to oversee the cars being put on the truck - the drivers would hang around inside the truck with their vehicles, drinking and whatnot. Blair and Toretto were going to follow the truck in Toretto’s Mustang, mainly so that Toretto had another chance to drive the thing. Blair found herself sitting in the passenger’s seat again, her legs stretched onto the dashboard and crossed at the ankles as she punched the coordinates and address of the place they were headed into the GPS. She selected the music from the iPod, and then laid back to relax for the five-hour trip.

“Where do we stop for gas?” Toretto asked, noticing that someone had topped off his tank.

“In a few hours, it’s all in the route information I put in for you.” She managed to fall asleep for an hour or two before waking up at the first gas stop.

“Good morning Miss Mutterer,” Toretto teased, as she stuck her head out the open window. Blair scowled.

“I was not that asleep, don’t flatter yourself.” She glanced around, looking for the truck. “Uh, Toretto? Are you running ahead or behind the truck?”

“You were, and we’re behind at the moment, at this one-pump-wonder of a gas station you picked out here.” Blair nodded, settling back into her seat as Toretto went to pay. “Let’s play some catch up,” He grinned, and threw the car into drive, shifting like a pro. The pulled up behind the lumbering truck in no time - Toretto sunk into a drafting position and set the cruise control.

“You have a nice touch on the gas,” Blair admitted, taking off her heels so she could sit on her feet. Toretto turned to her, quirked an eyebrow and turned back to the road. “I’m serious, that’s a compliment. None of these other dogs can drive like that.”

“That’s probably because you taught them.” Toretto shot back at her, the believed she was just insulting him as usual. Blair glared at him once more, but chose to ignore the statement. She and Toretto drove in silence for another few hours until they reached the city, and finally arrived at the large parking garage.

A hushed silence came over the usually rowdy group as Blair, Toretto, and Blair’s boys (who had offloaded just outside of town) arrived; Blair’s cars were so uniform, her reputation so formidable that people treated her and anyone associated with her with reverence. Except the little slutty girls that tended to accompany street racing. It was refreshing to see Blair among the crowd, Toretto realized as she returned to where he leaned against his Mustang (which required constant supervision because of how high profile and rare it was).

“We’ve arranged the races; would you like to be the money man?” Toretto raised an eyebrow, prompting Blair to add, “Because of your car, they think you’d be easy to find if you ran off with the cash.” She produced a bag from her shoulder, with the money in it. He scowled.

“A Purse? Literally?” Toretto held the thing out by the strap on his pinky finger, unzipping it to make sure she wasn’t playing a trick on him. It was packed with rubles.

“Well, you don’t have to carry it, just keep it in the Saleen.” He did so, watching Blair dissimilate back into the crowd of half-naked girls and adrenaline junkies. She was like Letty in that way, she also stood out from the racing crowd, but for different reasons.

While she had the looks and the body, Blair was no flag girl. She was disinclined to watch the beginning of a race, and more apt to wait at the finish line to congratulate “her” winner. For Blair’s racer’s barely lost, Toretto noticed, no matter how inferior she claimed them to be, Blair’s boys were winners. Toretto couldn’t fault their technique - it appeared that Blair had an eye for a good racer like a horse breeder had an eye for a good stallion. Even though she was queen of the scene, she clung to Toretto as if she were his trophy wife, asking him the occasional question about his thoughts as if she valued them. Which she did, Blair was used to having some sort of bodyguard among the crowds at the races, simply because like the Mustang she was a high-profile target.

She also had a sixth sense for when the cops would show up. She distributed winnings other racers deserved and called it a night at 4:30 AM, and as Toretto drove off, he spotted flashing lights in the distance. Blair pulled the purse from beneath the Mustang’s plush leather seat, flicking through the bills as she began to divide their winnings.

“You can drive home as fast as you’d like, darling. The boys know who has the money, and if they don’t show for it…” She smiled wryly, kissing Dominic’s cheek before he sped off into the night.

Toretto couldn’t help but wonder what the punishment for not showing was - he didn’t really want to guess.


	7. Corona

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Corona by Minutemen

Toretto had been trying for Blair - after seeing her look so alive, so in her element at the races, he couldn’t not. His hair was growing, straight and black it was nearly half an inch long on top of his head. Although he couldn’t stand a beard, stubble grew on his cheeks - a permanent 5-o’clock shadow. She had also accompanied him into town several times to work on his tattoos, his sleeve was coming along nicely; in reality, he just liked going to the bars with her before he was worked on. Toretto was startled about just how hard he would work to get a kiss on the cheek from the redhead - she was infectious, charming, and knew just the right buttons to push on him to get the reaction she wanted. Some people would call it manipulation, but for him it was just another reason to be enamored with her.

Blair and Mia had become even better friends as the snow began to thaw - the saw it as an excuse to go tanning in the super-heated pool on the roof. The sun was out, and the pair were up in the pool while the men secluded themselves in their garages working on their cars. Blair had been trying desperately to get herself a tan, as she had somehow been convinced that the pale redhead look wasn’t working any longer, but she had ended up with a painful sunburn thus far. Mia was laughing at Blair as she went to get a pair of beers for them.

With Blair and Mia both tied up, Toretto got to spend some quality time with the Buster, a luxury he never thought he would have… end sarcasm. He was never really surprised by how little Spillner really knew about cars and why Blair would never let him race for her. It was a fact Spillner complained about nonstop.

“Dude, Blair still hasn’t asked me to go with her. The GT-R could blow all of her other cars out of the water, and she won’t let me do shit.” Toretto sighed, cranking a wrench on a bolt. He didn’t care to mess with the Saleen too much, but the occasional mod or tune-up was necessary, even for the super machine that he had the pleasure of driving. There was a difference in the way Blair treated Mia and Dominic’s cars in relation to all of her others - the Nissan GT-R Brian drove was one of Blair’s. Mia’s Jetta was hers; Dominic’s car was his (except for the bragging rights and the occasional demand for a ride into Tver or Moscow, which Toretto was all too happy to oblige).

“Brian. I don’t drive for her either. So put a sock in it Buster.” Toretto cranked on the nut until it was nice and tight, thick arm muscles bulging painfully against his new tattoo. The artist had told him that stretching it wasn’t such a great idea, but what else was he supposed to do? Toretto was sure it would look fine in the end. “Maybe she won’t let you drive because she’s afraid you’ll break a ninety thousand dollar car. I’d hate to think of how much money that is in fucking rubles!”

Spillner shook his head, reaching for the wrench Toretto held out to him to get it out of his way - the muscle man still had his head inside the engine compartment when the Buster whacked the thin cable rod that held up the hood. The last thing Toretto remembered feeling was the smash of his nose on the engine casing and saying the words “Aw, Shit,”

*****

Blair and Mia paced in the emergency room, Blair peeking in on the surgery every so often - which was usually about when Mia ran to the nearest trash can to vomit. Brian - Blair had gleaned from the near-hysterical man as Blair drive Dominic, the Buster and Mia to the nearest hospital at breakneck speed in the very same vehicle that Toretto had just been crushed in - had managed to knock the support from under the extremely heavy hood of the Mustang, which had come crashing down on Toretto’s shoulders and head. The doctors had told Blair that he was going to have some heavy scarring on his shoulders from the point of impact, and that Toretto wouldn’t have needed emergency surgery if his nose hadn’t been broken so many times in the past.

This fact alone made Blair feel terrible about herself; not only had she forced him into getting tattoos, but apparently she had contributed to a timely nose job as well. Mia, however, was very good at finding the brighter side to situations such as the one in which they found themselves. As she held an extremely upset Brian, stroking his hair gently, she said;

“Well, at least a different face will get the police off him,” She quipped, trying to make Brian feel better. But she had a very good and very valid point - after he got a nose job, Toretto was definitely going to go up on Blair’s list of racers. While she sat in the chair of the hospital, she began to wonder what they were going to do with Toretto’s hulking monster of a nose, what he might look like after a nose job.

Blair pulled her long red hair out of her face as the doctors rolled a groggy Toretto out of the operating room and into a private room, speaking rapid Russian. Unconsciously, Blair translated from Brian and Mia as the followed him into the room.

“And the surgery went great, yadda yadda yadda sternum, deviated septum fixed, something medical about the cartilage. We shouldn’t let him break it any more because that wouldn’t end well, he might end up looking like Michael Jackson, bla bla bla. Overall one of the easiest nose jobs they‘ve ever had the pleasure of doing.” Mia laughed so hard she was gasping, leaning on Brian as they trailed behind the gurney.

Blair couldn’t believe her eyes when they got to Toretto’s room. He wasn’t going to need to stay overnight at all, just come back for an eventual check up, but that didn’t mean he looked great. The doctors said his nose was going to look fantastic after the swelling went down, but both Mia and Blair agreed that it looked even bigger and more misshapen than it had before the nose job!

Still feeling groggy and quite numb, Toretto couldn’t understand why everyone was laughing at him until he was finally able to stand and look into the mirror across the room.

“What the fuck, Buster!” His throaty growl escalated to a shout as he saw his misshapen and huge nose, barely covered by the strip of tape down its center. He couldn’t breathe through it for the huge amount of gauze packed inside it to keep it from collapsing. All of this compounded with the fact that Blair had just paid for him to have his nose done, and the muscled man jumped on Brian, beginning to throttle him senseless as Blair and Mia pulled on him, both screaming at the top of their lungs.

“Knock it off Dominic! He didn’t mean to!” Mia screamed, as Blair shouted “Toretto, stop! He’s just a Buster!”

*****

A week later, Blair and Toretto returned to the hospital to get the bandages and gauze removed and undergo a final checkup. His healing process hadn’t been a fun one, Mia and Blair both knew how difficult it was now to remove gauze packing and add new stuff to a nostril with a pair of tweezers without causing an enormous amount of pain to the person in question. One night, Blair awoke to Toretto pounding on her door, because he had attempted to blow his nose in his sleep and ended up with a nosebleed that didn’t stop for over twenty minutes. She had thought that one would require another trip top the hospital - this time for a blood transfusion. Blair had even cancelled her racer’s weekly trip into Helsinki for the weekend street racing there because of Toretto’s incapacitated state; and partially because she didn’t want him to miss such an awesome trip.

Blair had to admit it was worth it, though. Toretto looked all right - with the aid of the drugs he had been given for the pain in his nose, he had forced the tattoo artist to finish his sleeve completely. If she hadn’t known him, she wouldn’t recognize him at all.

“This is great Dominic, really.” She smiled brightly as she sucked down a shot of vodka, reveling in the strange newness of Toretto’s new figure.

“You really like it, huh?” He smiled cockily to one side, toying with the gauge earring Blair had convinced him to get - he was trying to stretch his ears to be just a little bit bigger than hers, in order to look manlier. “Did you not like the way I looked before?” Toretto said, just trying to push Blair’s buttons. Unfortunately for him, she could push harder.

“Ugh, you were just so damned ugly; I could barely even look at you sometimes. The only reason I kept you around was because you’re a kick ass driver.” Toretto threw his head back and laughed that same, deep-throated laugh Blair had loved from before. He wasn’t a different man, she knew, he just looked different. Blair clasped his hand as they left the bar, pulling him close so that she could whisper in his ear.

“Are you up for racing in Helsinki tomorrow? Would you like to?” Toretto raised an eyebrow, looking down at the crazed little redhead beside her.

“Are you insane? Of course! When the fuck do we leave?” He paused for a moment, and then decided to add; “You’re not bringing Spillner, are you? He keeps bellyaching about not racing.”

“It’s because I don’t want him to wreck a fucking ninety-thousand dollar car!”

Toretto laughed until his stomach hurt on the drive home.


	8. Devils

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Devils by The 69 Eyes

The atmosphere in Blair’s unofficial side of the parking garage for the Compound was nearly overexcited, especially Toretto. He hadn’t left Blair’s side since she had invited him on the trip with her, he had committed himself to planning every detail of the trip - one that Blair and her team had been on many times, and didn’t require the meticulous details Toretto added. But Blair couldn’t fault him on his enthusiasm - the man hadn’t raced in months, she figured he was probably going stir crazy.

Which he was. It was strange, though; the aspect of the trip was not that he was going to get to race, but that Blair was bringing her BMW - which he took as a sign that she was going to race. Toretto had wanted to watch the little redhead compete since she had presented him with his car; she obviously had good taste in vehicles, which definitely meant she could drive… he hoped. The muscle man was to base his entire opinion of Blair’s character around how she raced, simply because he was on the fence about her. Blair was a woman who Toretto couldn’t decide if he loved or hated, and with Blair, there was no in between.

“So we’re going to pack the M5 and the Saleen, we’ll drive the M7 I have. I can hear it calling my name, Toretto, begging me ‘Blair, please drive me. I’m the ultimate driving machine,’” Blair stole Toretto’s Corona from the workbench, near which she was perched on a stool, watching him work. Toretto had installed a second hood strut in addition to the original, with one on either side; he had less of a chance for being squashed under the hood again. If he had to get another nose job, there was fear that he would end up looking less like M. Shadows and more like Michael Jackson. Blair had laughed at him at first, saying that as long as the Buster wasn’t around he had nothing to fear, at which point Toretto practically tore off his shirt to show her the enormous, front-of-a-car-hood-shaped scabby scar forming on his back. Unlike his nose, that she hadn’t had the pleasure of re-bandaging, although she doubted she would have wanted to.

“Why not just drive the ‘Stang?” Toretto grunted, using a socket wrench on some obscure thing beneath the hood that Blair couldn’t quite make out.

“It’s too far; you know how many miles that would put on your baby? She’d stop looking so new and start feeling a little… tired.” Blair chuckled, sipping from the Corona. She had brought him down a case, so she didn’t feel bad at all.

If there was one thing that was bad about being a convicted criminal running from the law it was the location. The compound was nearly an hour and a half outside of Tver, making a trip to St. Petersburg five hours and one to Moscow three and a half. It made for very difficult party planning, that was certain. Helsinki was even farther away - St. Petersburg plus nearly three hours through urban areas. She had been forced to commission another SUV-type vehicle for the transportation of her team, because she couldn’t just let them stew in the transport truck for six hours.

Toretto stopped working to wipe his hands on a nasty-looking rag tucked into his waistband and snatched his Corona back from Blair’s well-manicured hands. He was about to reprimand her before he spotted the 12-pack resting on his workbench. With a sigh, Toretto finished the last of the beer, neglecting to open another in favor of sitting next to the Brit. There wasn’t much more tuning he could do to the Mustang, it was as hones as a surgeon’s blade, and even more delicate; he didn’t want to fuck up his most valuable possession the day he needed it.

“When do we leave?” He asked as he tossed the bottle into the trashcan beside him.

“Oh, I’d say an hour and a half; it depends on how long it takes for the monkeys to load up their cars.” Blair shrugged and glanced over at her own car. She had worked on it herself in the wee hours of the morning, installing the nitrous system that was necessary for street racing but not something she liked to keep in the car for legal driving. Too many bad memories. “And thanks to you I now look like a criminal,” Scowling, Blair inspected the red-tinted spider webbing around her elbow - it matched Toretto’s perfectly, down to the arm it was on. However, since she had less surface area on her elbow, he spider web was smaller. “Oh! I got you a present, but I had to wear them first, just in case.” Blair pulled the mirrored silver aviators off the top of her head and handed them to Toretto, motioning for him to put them on.

“Why?” He shook his head, questioning both the gift and her need to wear them.

“Well, what if they looked really good on me? I’d have to buy another pair!” Blair laughed, her cockney accent shining through her usually refined British. Toretto shook his head at her antics, then put the sunglasses on and inspected his reflection in the mirror-slick surface of the Saleen. He had been having a difficult time getting used to his new nose - who would have known that a blow to the nose and the nose job that followed would be enough to change one’s entire face? Toretto hadn’t expected it, but secretly he was glad for the accident that had caused plastic surgery to become necessary - his face, he realized, had been extremely distinctive before. Even going to St. Petersburg with Blair had been an enormous risk prior to the accident.

“I like ‘em.” Toretto pulled Blair into his muscular arms - one of which was still covered by a black trash-bag to keep his healing tattoos in check - to kiss the top of her forehead; Blair struggled against the gesture.

“Hey! Don‘t make me break your nose again!” She laughed, sliding from beneath his grasp. Blair had work to do, no time for cutesy antics from Toretto. “I have to go pack,” She pressed her fingertip gently against Toretto’s nose as she walked away.

“Ah, fuck clothes,” He turned back to working on his car in the loud silence of the garage.

An hour later, Toretto found himself leaning on the Mustang with a duffel bag over his shoulder, watching as the other drivers loaded their cars into the long semi truck. Blair’s M5 had gone on first; she had taken great pains to ensure that her vehicle was loaded with the utmost care and caution - like it was her child or something. She oversaw the operation from the hood of her BMW M7, which she perched on delicately, her heels hooked into the front grille so as not to scratch it. Mia stood beside her; Blair conversed with her in a distracted way as she made certain that none of her cars were dinged in the process of loading.

She was always this obsessive about her vehicles, Toretto had noticed - Blair had little trust for her convict racing team, even though she was a convict herself. He attributed her possessiveness to the fact that they were all still her hard-earned cars (even if hard earned sometimes included tracking down shipments and grand theft auto - which Toretto couldn’t fault her for either), and most of the people who raced for her were renowned for jacking cars and racing in the past.

Toretto’s car went on last, one of the heavier cars compared to the rest. He was mindful of Blair’s watchful eye as he gently accelerated up the ramp - he couldn’t help but wonder what she would do to him if he managed to run into the car in front of him. He didn’t want to know, really. Shouldering his duffel bag, Toretto approached Mia and Blair, smiling excitedly.

“What went up your ass, Dom?” Mia inquired, curious for the source of his goofy grin.

“I get to race, Mia! Finally!” Toretto threw back his head and laughed deeply.

“You,” Blair began, sliding off the hood of her car, “Are insane. And obsessed.” She laughed as well; Mia sadly shook her head as she said her goodbyes to her friend and brother, wishing them luck.

“I’m sure we don’t need the luck, they do.” Blair motioned to her other racers with her head, a sly smile crossed her pale face as she regarded Toretto, who laughed uproariously at her lack of trust for her racers; inwardly, Toretto wondered how Blair managed to captivate the respect of her drivers without returning the action. He lowered himself into the passenger’s seat of Blair’s BMW as she closed her door. The engine roared to life.

Toretto could never sleep while in the car, even while sitting in the passenger seat he was completely enthralled by the machine he was sitting in. After a few hours of his restless tinkering with the glove box - he had taken it off and re-assembled it twice, along with the center console - Blair offered to let Toretto drive for a little while. A little while turned into the remainder of the trip, Blair controlled the playlist and the conversation while Toretto guided the M7 down the predetermined route.

“Excited much?” Blair asked, watching the speedometer - Toretto had a continuing pattern of accelerating and coasting, catching up with the pack and falling behind. “Just set the fucking cruise control.” She murmured, rubbing her temples.

“Alright, grumpy.” Toretto glanced over at her. “What’s your problem?” He asked, tilting his head to the side as he watched the road, the sunset reflecting off his mirrored aviators.

“I’d like some alcohol and a cigarette. I have neither.” She glanced over at Toretto, who simply sighed as he continued down the road after the slow-moving carrier truck.

They arrived at the hotel they would be staying at three hours later, a Best Western which used to be a Prison (according to Blair). Its shear beauty struck Toretto as he climbed out of the car, leaning over the BMW’s low roof to inspect the tall building.

“I only booked it because it has an enormous parking lot, not because it’s particularly beautiful.” Blair shrugged, flinging a large, printed duffel bag over her shoulder.

“Worried about loosing your bag?” Toretto debated weather or not to take the garishly bright thing from her and carry it for her while he joked. After a moment of debate, he plucked it off her shoulder; it joined his own camouflage-print duffel bag. The thing was extremely heavy, heavier than he would have thought.

“Apparently it’s a well-founded fear.” Blair murmured as she blazed into the lobby of the Hotel, demanding their room keys and paying the price of their rooms up front, she spoke very fluent and crisp Finnish in addition to her English and Russian - Toretto had to admit that he was impressed. The receptionist seemed very startled by her appearance in contrast to the six tattooed men who accompanied her. Turning away from the receptionist, Blair distributed the keys - keeping a copy of each key for herself. Toretto raised an eyebrow as she pocketed the copies and her own keys, and picked up her duffel bag as they proceeded to their rooms.

“Well, what the hell are we supposed to do until we race?” Toretto asked as Blair fiddled with her room key. She glanced up and reached out for her duffel bag.

“Visit the sauna? I don’t know, I’m sure you can occupy yourself.” She bustled inside her room and closed the door. Toretto was left standing in his doorway, wondering what the hell had just happened to him. He threw his duffel on the bed, and inspected the fliers that sat on the desk. Moments later, he picked up the phone receiver and dialed.

“I’d like room 305, please.” He waited for a moment. “Blair?”

“What, Dominic? Not have enough to do?”

“Well, yes. Wanna go to dinner with me?” His fingers drummed against the dark wood of the desk in his beautiful hotel room.

“Where?” Blair waited fro an answer, wondering if she brought enough clothing for an extra outing.

“La Petite Mansion. I’ll pay.”

“Oh, that’s so nice of you, with who’s money shall you be paying?” Blair teased, pulling together an outfit of her bag as she spoke.

“Well, it’s not like I haven’t been saving on my own.”

“Really?”

“No. But I’ve got it covered, ok?”

“How long?”

“Until… we go?” Toretto tipped his head. “Thirty minutes.”

“Done.” Blair hung up. Toretto immediately dialed down to the lobby for a suit.

Thirty minutes later, he stood in the lobby, pacing back and forth between attempting to communicate with the Receptionist. Locating a suit rental had been the most difficult part of the evening - getting reservations at a five-star French restaurant had been surprisingly easy. What was most difficult, though, was understanding how Blair had managed to fit an entire garnet red, floor-length dress in her little duffel bag. She swooped down the stairs like an eagle on a mouse, shoulders back, face bright and smiling. Toretto couldn’t help but begin to smile at her and her gleaming pearls.

“How in hell did you accomplish that one?” Toretto asked, offering his arm to her. He led her to the waiting M7.

“I would ask the same about the suit.” Blair commented, smiling as Toretto opened the door for her. “Get me some Duck. Let’s go.”


	9. Life Burns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Life Burns by Apocalyptica

Dinner had been excellent, and it had given Blair and Toretto a chance to bond over something other than cars. In this case, it happened to be Toretto’s sheer lack of manners, and Blair’s surplus of them.

“Why the hell do you keep switching hands, Dominic? Cut your meat and eat it, don‘t bother with all of this freakiness with the fork.” Blair sighed, watching Toretto tear into his steak with abandon, attempting to wolf down huge hunks of it while she sat, straight-backed and refined, trimming her roast duck delicately.

“If I ate like you I’d always be hungry, miss charm school!” Toretto grunted, finishing the last bite of the Fillet Mignon with relish before digging into his potato like a starved barbarian. All Blair could do was sigh, and continue to make good face for the rest of the restaurant - refined old women and men who were extremely distasteful of Toretto’s stubble and the tattoos that peeked from his sleeve when he reached for anything on the table. Not that they didn’t notice the spider webbing and the planets through Venus that were visible on Blair’s back through her flaming red hair. This thought made her laugh uproariously, drawing more glares from the “refined,” upper-class stodgies.

“Why did you have to pick such a nice restaurant?” Blair whispered sharply to him across the table, leaning towards her hulking date.

“Because I thought you’d like it,” Toretto whispered back, also leaning across the table.

“I prefer biker bars,” Blair whispered back, grinning slyly. It was Toretto’s turn to laugh; he threw back his head, nearly tipping over his chair as his body shook. Blair grinned.

“Let us leave?” Toretto attempted to imitate Blair’s British accent and failed miserably.

“Check, please.”

Half an hour later, Blair emerged from her room in her customary black skinny-fit pants and a white silken shirt. She met Toretto in the hall outside their rooms, glad to see him back in a t-shirt and jeans; then together they began pounding on doors.

“Get your lazy asses up we have a race to win!” Blair called, as Toretto beat the doors wish his burly fists. One by one, Blair’s racers emerged from their rooms - the last to walk out was a man named Vladimir… and he walked out with a woman who looked suspiciously like a hooker.

“Vladimir! What the hell are you doing?” Blair - all five feet five inches of Blair - stalked right up to the hulking man that was Vladimir and began to reprimand him. Toretto was amazed - the driver actually looked frightened with the tiny redhead snapping at him from under his nose, shaking a finger. She rounded on the hooker. “What are you still doing here?” She snarled, glaring at the woman.

“I haven’t been paid.” The woman shrugged. Blair stared daggers at Vladimir as she pulled a handful of bills from her pocket. “Here. Euro. Leave.” The girl stormed out, donning her coat as she left. Blair turned on the rest of her drivers. “What are you still doing here? Get the cars off the truck! Now!”

“Geeze Hundley, tone it down.” Toretto watched as Vladimir raced down the steps, eager to get back on her good graces.

“I don’t ‘tone down.’” Blair shrugged, shouldering a black purse that Toretto knew to be filled with money - it was the same bag he had been forced to watch over the last time he was able to go racing with Blair. It was all Toretto could do to keep up with the high-heeled fiery redhead as she stormed down the stairs and out into the parking lot to oversee the unloading of the cars.

Blair continued her stubborn streak until she was seated in her car, revving the engine while she observed the other men get warmed up for the race - she wished they would refrain from doing donuts in the parking lot, but perfection was unattainable from a pack of convicts. After a few minutes of watching, she drove off toward the “venue” of the race - a large parking garage that rose up stories high from the ground. Toretto trailed behind the pack, watching as Blair’s drivers wove through traffic as if they were trying to get an enormous ticket or something.

Once again, Blair drove up as if she owned the place, but the sense of renown and respect Toretto had felt while in St. Petersburg with her. Here, it seemed that the racers either didn’t know her or though her to be pretentious; she still knew the right people to talk to in order to hook her drivers up with a race. When Toretto asked about it, Blair simply shrugged.

“Team leaders have a certain look around here. More tattoos, more women, you know,” Blair took the purse from the hands of Finnish racer who had just added his bets to the pot. Toretto held out his hand for the bag, expecting to be pack mule once more.

“No, silly, tonight you’re racing. You need to make me some money.” She grinned broadly, handing him a few bills from her pocket. “Now go play, have some fun before your race. Watch that damned car!” She turned to walk away, but Toretto grabbed her arm before she made more than a few steps. “What?”

“I don’t want to hang out with the bimbos and sluts,” He tilted his head to the side, offering his arm to her.

“But I’m boring.”

“Not to me.” They leaned against the Mustang and chattered nonchalantly about the quality of the women around Helsinki (dismal, Toretto decided, they all had tiny faces and even tinier tits), and the cockiness of the drivers (which was strange, as Toretto had always heard that Finnish people were very introvert). Blair also commented on Vladimir’s love of hookers.

“I’ve never caught him with one before, but the boys say he’s always got one with him,” She spied him through the crowd after a few moments of searching.

“My guess is he doesn’t need them here,” Toretto watched as scantily clad women crowded around Blair’s racers. “The girls are just throwing themselves at him.” And the only reason they weren’t crowding around him, he reasoned, was because he sat with the intimidating-looking Brit.

“Despicable,” Blair muttered, shaking her head. “I had planned to replace him with Brian, you know… But the stories I’ve heard about him and his track record with cars is disheartening.” She sighed. “Quality drivers are difficult to come by these days.” Toretto felt her eyes on him as he surveyed the crowd.

“When do I race?” He asked, ignoring her gaze. Two could play the game she had been practicing on him for weeks.

“Now,” Blair stood and stalked away, and was swallowed by the crowd as she made her way to her BMW. Toretto watched her until he couldn’t find her among the bodies any longer, and got into the Mustang. The car was an effective crowd-mover, everyone parted in front of the long hood and intimidating engine’s noise to let him through to the front of the parking garage, where he spotted a black M3 rounding the corner with several imports - which were the norm in Europe, he recalled. Toretto eased on up to the starting line, frowning when the M3 sped off ahead of him - to the finish line, as she didn’t care for the starts of races, he recalled.

Blair pulled up along the finish line, wondering if Toretto was even prepared to start racing again. First race of the night and she was already antsy - she could feel a stress zit coming on in her forehead - but she knew it wasn’t because she was afraid of loosing any money. She attributed it to a bad feeling she had gotten since seeing Vladimir with the hooker. Bile had been rising in her gut since then, and she felt that she was going to vomit as she perched on the hood of her car. That was the real reason she was pack mule that night - not because she didn’t want to race, but because of the terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was about to go horrifyingly wrong.

Toretto’s heat went well; he won by nearly a second - a huge margin in the quarter mile. Blair was impressed, but couldn’t congratulate Toretto through his crowd of admirers, and so she settled in to observe the next line of drivers swoop around the corner. And another - this one had Kolya, one of her men in it, so she watched intently. It was a close heat, but creative NOS usage brought Tristan into the lead and ultimately won him the ten-second race. At this point, Toretto had managed to park the Saleen a few cars over from Blair, and joined her at the black hood of her car.

“I don’t know why you don’t trust your men, they’re good guys.” Toretto said, placing his hand on the small of her back as he leaned on the hood beside her.

“I trust them. Just only as far as my arms reach. Like I would trust you if Mia and I weren’t so close.” Blair sighed, drinking from a large water bottle before she leaned her head on Toretto’s shoulder. Vladimir’s quarter was in a few heats - he would be in one of the last high-grossing races of the evening, and the last of Blair’s boys to race - and the concern Blair felt continued to grow as the lines of cars came in and then cleared the finish line.

“Why so serous?” Toretto joked, noting her pained expression.

“It’s nothing… Just a bad feeling, you know?” Toretto narrowed his eyes and said something as the next line of cars passed, but Blair couldn’t hear him over the roar of the cars. “I’m fine Dominic, I swear.” Toretto doubted it, but he could hear the next line of cars rounding the corner and didn’t say anything. Vladimir’s sleek black Lexus F Performance model streaked around the corner, battling for a close lead with a souped-up Subaru. Blair gripped Toretto’s arm as the cars slid around the corner (Helsinki racers liked just a taste of drifting - that and a straight quarter would have brought them to a brick street), her eyes widening in horror as her stomach dropped through her feet.

“Dominic,” She whispered through the silence, watching.

The Subaru’s back end had started to fishtail, and the inexperienced driver had obviously freaked out and tapped on the break. The back end skidded around on the oil-slicked new road, smashing into the side of the Lexus. The driver immediately behind the two cars managed to brake fast enough to avoid collision, but not the drunken buffoon in the red Infiniti who smashed into Vladmir’s back end. The Lexus lifted off the ground, flipping forward over the front end of the Subaru before smashing into the ground; and bursting into flames from the NOS that Vladimir kept in the front seat beside him.

Blair gripped Toretto’s arm hard enough for her nails to penetrate the skin, Kolya rushed to her other side from where he had parked behind Blair as she went down, fainting face-first toward the pavement. Toretto scooped her up in his arms, glancing at Kolya.

“We need to get out of here, take the Saleen.” He handed Kolya the keys.

“We need to help Vladimir,” Blair murmured lightly, beginning to come to within seconds.

“Can you drive your car, Blair?”

“No.” Toretto dumped her in the passenger’s seat of the BMW as Kolya sped off in Toretto’s Mustang - gladly leaving his Nissan parallel parked. Toretto knew there was nothing to tie either of the cars to Blair, and if it was still there the next morning, they could always pick it up.

“But Vladimir,” Blair’s nails dug into Toretto’s arm again as she came around, just as they pulled into the parking lot.

“Blair.” Toretto parked her car next to the Mustang, turning to her with the engine idling. “Blair, Vladimir’s dead. He couldn’t have survived that wreck. Blair. Blair!” He got out of the car and reached for the door handle, but Blair had already unbuckled her seat belt and lifted herself out of the car with little of Toretto’s aid.

“I can’t… I…” She leaned on his shoulder, looking blankly at Kolya.

“Take Mikhail and do a drive by. If the cops aren’t swarming by it, get your car. Don’t make a big deal.” Toretto instructed Kolya, who handed him the keys to the Saleen. The muscled man seemed to be the only one who had been able to keep his head- probably because he didn’t know Vladimir very well at all.

“Dominic, I could have stopped him… I could have, I should have. I got that feeling in my gut about the race.” Blair shook her head as Toretto helped her up the stairs to their rooms.

“There’s nothing you could have done Blair,” He grunted, opening the door to his room and guiding her to the bed. He tore the sheets back and set her in it, placing his large paw on her forehead. “Blair. Look at me.” She acquiesced, opening her mismatched eyes to meet Toretto’s chocolate brown ones; tears watered into existence in their corners. Frowning, Toretto clutched her frail body to his chest as she cried, her arms wrapped around his middle with surprisingly crushing force.

The girl never ceased to surprise him.


	10. Perfect Skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Perfect Skin by The 69 Eyes

“I could have.” Blair said finally, her eyes dry for the sheer fact that she couldn’t cry any longer. Blair, the shrewd redhead, crying - Dominic never thought he would see the day. Unfortunately, it took the death of a teammate to elicit tears from her bright eyes. Toretto’s large, callused thumbs wiped the remainder of her tears from her cheeks, fixing her running makeup as he did so.

“I need a cigarette,” She murmured, pulling her heels off and dumping them on the ground unceremoniously before leaning back on Toretto’s bed. She watched him pace as she made herself comfortable, pulling the covers up to her chin. After a few minutes, she threw the covers off and stood, proceeding to the bathroom.

Toretto sat on the edge of the bed, staring out the open window. He was watching to see if Kolya and Mikhail would be successful in retrieving the Nissan Kolya had left at the race.

“I wouldn’t expect them back so soon,” Blair emerged from the bathroom dripping wet, clad in a plush white robe that she had found hanging there.

“What did you just do, dunk your head in the shower?”

“Yes. I did. And I feel better for it.” She wrapped her hair in a towel, retrieving the remote before she sat back on Toretto’s bed - sans makeup, sans fancy clothes. Toretto turned to observe her, his brow wrinkling.

“Why shouldn’t I expect them back?” Blair picked up the bedside phone and asked for room service - Vodka and Marlboro‘s. She ordered a case of Corona as well for Toretto before she hung up and answered him.

“They’ll probably end up at a bar. They were Vladimir’s friends.” She massaged her temples again, and didn’t speak until the room service she had requested arrived. “Could you please -?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.” Toretto answered the door and accepted the flimsy-looking cart from the sturdy-looking woman who rolled it toward him. He handed her a small bill before she departed. “How much would you like?” He regarded the bottle of Absolut and the two glasses with concern - hard liquor was not his cup of tea. Blair motioned to him to roll the cart closer to the bed, so he did, watching as she poured half a glass of the clear liquid, drained it, and then filled it again before setting it down on her bedside. Toretto took a Corona out of the case, and dropped a lime from the uniform bunch cut up on the plate as Blair began to smack the pack of Marlboro’s against the palm of her hand. She noticed the glare Toretto was giving her before he knew he was glaring at her.

“I could be a prostitute on the streets going Heroin with the money I get from having sex with random men, so don’t you dare say a word about my cigarettes.” She opened the pack and placed on in her mouth, reaching for the ashtray after she lit the cancer stick.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Yeah right.” Blair breathed out a stream of smoke as she spoke, and then took a sip of her vodka directly afterward. “I need to feel numb tonight anyway.” She sighed, sniffled a bit, and took a long drag.

“I understand.” Toretto had suddenly become quiet, introspective.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, watching Toretto flip through the HBO channels with abandon, passing about sixteen good movies. Blair sat up, balancing her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, watching Toretto down the dregs of his Corona.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me it’s nothing, you don’t choke down a Corona that fast when it’s nothing.” Toretto sighed, leaning back on the plush white sheets of the bed, his head between Blair’s manicured toes, his eyes closed.

“There’s a good bit about my life that I haven’t told you yet.” He grunted.

“It’s mutual darling.” Blair crossed her legs so se was sitting Indian-style, the covers over her lap and her hands on her face, elbows on her knees to support her head.

“Well. Letty and I had dated for quite a while - five and a half years. She was a ride-or-die chick, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” Blair smiled lightly, Mia had told her a little about Letty, but refused to tell her the actual story of her death.

“And what happened to this perfect woman?” She asked, looking at Toretto’s closed eyes.

“She was killed by a drug lord. After surviving a horrific car accident.” He sighed, rubbing his paws over his face. Blair greedily sucked on her cigarette, saying nothing - there was nothing she could say, she hadn’t ever experienced something to that caliber of loss. After a moment, she spoke.

“I’m so sorry,” She breathed, leaning back against the headboard while reflecting on Vladimir’s death.

“There was nothing I could do,” Toretto sighed, sitting up. “I avenged her - of course.” Blair lifted an eyebrow, so Toretto elaborated. “I killed the fucker.” Blair’s eyes widened momentarily, and leaned her head back toward the ceiling.

“Well then. Did that make you feel better about it?”

“Yes, it did.” He looked at her, his chocolate eyes rimmed with tears.

“Ah, knock it off you,” Blair wiped at the bottoms of his eyes with her slight thumbs, causing Toretto to smile wearily. “How long has it been?” She rested her hand on his black buzzed hair, rubbing the top of his head as she would a dog. Toretto rubbed his head into her hand, enjoying her long nails.

“Almost six months.” Blair stopped scratching.

“No,” She breathed, gulping on her cigarette.

“Why, is that a problem?” Toretto asked, watching as she downed the rest of her vodka. As usual, she filibustered his question.

“May I sleep with you tonight?” She asked, then scrunched her face up as small as it would get as Toretto burst out laughing. “I mean sleep in here.”

“Yes you can,” Toretto said through laughter. Blair finished her cigarette and crushed it out into the ashtray, scowling.

“I’m tired, then. Would you like to go to bed now?” She perched with the bottle of vodka in her hand, waiting for Toretto to give his verdict.

“Yes.” He stood and crossed the room, turning out the light. Blair immediately made a dive for the remote, flipping back to HBO for one of the movies Toretto had passed earlier.

“I thought you said you were going to bed?” He asked, sitting on the edge of his side of the bed.

“I watch a little bit of the boob tube before I go to bed.” Toretto laughed as he stripped off his shirt - a movement Blair watched with interest out of her peripheral vision. He moved to take of his pants…

“What’re you doing?” She stopped him; her glass raised halfway to her lips.

“I’m… getting ready to go to sleep?” Toretto regarded her with a questioning look on his face, one eyebrow raised and his hands still at the button of his pants.

“I… don’t think I’ve had enough alcohol. Hold that thought.” Blair downed the new glass she had just poured. “Alright. Continue on.” Toretto stripped off his pants - Blair was pleased (surprised?) to find that he was disinclined to wearing underwear. She set the remote on the bedside table, drank a few mouthfuls more of alcohol, and stripped off her robe, lying down in the bed in a lacy matching set of bra and underwear next to a very naked Dominic Toretto.

Blair fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow again - Toretto was forced to reach for the remote to turn off the television two Coronas and half an hour later. His chest brushed Blair’s shoulder, and she immediately startled awake, sitting bolt upright and looking around.

“Blair! I’m sorry, calm down.” Toretto grumbled, settling back into his side of the bed.

“Ok…” She sounded as if she was already asleep; Blair lay back down, searching for a warm spot on the bed. Seconds later, she ended up in Toretto’s arms, snuggled happily up to his muscular chest. Toretto raised an eyebrow down at Blair’s sleeping face.

“Blair?” He whispered, nudging her shoulder gently.

“Yeah?”

“What’re you doing?”

“Being comfortable.” She murmured. Toretto’s fingers snaked around her chin, tipping her head up; their lips met gently, Blair’s eyelashes closed against his cheeks, sending shivers down his spine. He wrapped his tattooed arms around her tiny frame as she snuggled in closer for another kiss, their bodies meeting as if they were formed for one another. Toretto’s blunt fingers toyed with the clasp of Blair’s lacy bra for a moment before he managed to set the twins free as she wrapped her arms around his neck and a leg around his. Suddenly, Toretto pulled his head away from Blair’s.

“Blair! What are you doing,” He realized that he had one hand on her breast and one on her thigh. Her left hand was attempting to sift through his short hair without much success, her right clutching his shoulder blade.

“I hope that was a rhetorical question,” She asked, straining to meet his lips again. Toretto held her away long enough to ask;

“Are you on birth control?” He took Blair’s lips on his to be her answer - flipping her over on her back.

“Oh, Dominic,”


	11. Stare at the Sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Stare at the Sun by Thrice

When Dominic awoke he wasn’t surprised at all to find that Blair was conspicuously absent from his side. He figured that she wouldn’t be - just because of the fact that she was Blair Hundley and the fact that she had downed a quarter of the large bottle of Absolut that room service had brought her the evening before. Toretto had thought that she would have gone back to her own room, and therefore got to his feet and walked to the bathroom to take his customary morning piss… But Blair’s face was buried in the receptacle in which he had planned to pee. Groggily, Toretto touched her shoulder with a tentative paw - which triggered a spasm in her shoulders and uncontrollable heaving in her stomach.

Blair cursed the day she became a heavy drinker as she clutched the bottom of the toilet bowl, praying to the God who lived there to ease her hangover - fucking fast.

“Are you alright, Blair?” The burly man reached for a towel to wrap around his middle, then another to place over Blair’s naked shoulders. She looked so tiny retching into the toilet bowl he couldn’t help but feel bad, even though he had to pee like a racehorse and she had brought her situation upon herself.

“Do I lo -” She didn’t finish her muffled sentence as her stomach heaved once more. Dominic emptied the remains of the vodka in her glass tumbler into the bathroom sink and filled the glass with water.

“Drink this. Should I find some aspirin?” He asked, bracing himself for a tongue-lashing or The Exorcist-style projectile vomit. Toretto had no doubt in his mind which would have been worse. Again she murmured something unintelligible while reaching over to the bathtub to run a hot bath - while she was distracted with clambering into the tub and dipping her head under the scorching faucet, Dominic pounced on the opportunity to re-claim the toilet.

“Thanks for that,” Blair was understandable now, only her nose and mouth floated above the surface of the water. Dominic shrugged, not willing to apologize for necessities.

“Will you be alright to race later?” He asked, handing her the glass as she surfaced, her long hair clinging to her face and shoulders.

“What time is it?” The Brit was startled to learn it was nearly noon, and sighed. “I’ll have to, won’t I?” She drank the glass of water, asking for more of him by holding out the glass to him with a pitiful look on her face - one that told Toretto she was preparing to reject the liquid. He excused himself to her suite in order to shower and prepare himself for the day - when he returned half an hour later, Blair lay on his bed (still naked and dripping wet) smoking a cigarette.

“Speedy recovery,” Toretto murmured, slipping into a pair of jeans.

“I think it was more shock and grief than a hangover.” The redhead shrugged, taking a drag off her Marlboro. She was lying on her back, the tattoo on her abdomen was plainly visible to Dominic; yet he found himself averting his gaze from it out of respect for the tiny redhead. How the hell did she manage to command so much respect and yet never return it? She opened one eye to look at him, propping herself up on one elbow. Feeling uneasy at her mismatched gaze for once in his life, the muscular man committed himself to searching for a clean shirt in his dresser, but try as he might Dom couldn’t shake the feeling of her fiery eyes.

“What, Blair?” His tone was harsh as he spoke, forcing a clean shirt down over his head. When he turned back to her, he saw she had shifted, curled up into a little ball with a cigarette sticking out of it. Dominic cocked a brow - wondering what kind of drama Blair had in store for him this time - and crossed the room to run a calloused finger down the redhead’s prominent backbone, tracing the planets she had tattooed down her spine.

“I don’t know.” She opened her forest green eye to look at him through a mass of red hair. “I wonder weather it was the sex or the death of one of my drivers that has put me in a funk.” Oh. Ouch. He hadn’t planned on addressing the issue - hoped perhaps she had forgotten about her drunken advances; it wasn’t that Dominic minded the sex, it was the fact that he didn’t think Blair deserved to end up as Letty’s rebound girl. Blair’s eyes bored into him so knowingly that Dominic wondered if mind reading was something else with which she would surprise him. “Probably the grief.” She dismissed the though with a drag of her cigarette before she ducked her head back into her little ball.

“Blair,” Toretto reached out to envelop her tiny frame in his massive arms, pulling her naked body into his lap. Stubborn as always, Blair remained tight in a bud. “Blair,” He spoke again as he touched his lips to her forehead.

“I get it Toretto, really. But she’s gone. Focus on the living as my dear old dad used to say.” Needless to say, her father was long gone, which made the Brit giggle lightly, snaking her hand to her mouth to take a hearty breath of smoke from her Marlboro. Toretto pinched the cherry of her half-finished cigarette between his first two fingers and disdainfully plucked it from her hands before he set it in the ashtray.

“Shouldn’t you be doing the same thing?” He ran an enormous paw through her soft hair.

“Yeah, well…” For once, Blair didn’t have a snippy reply or some sort of backhanded reasoning to make her superior to Dominic.

“So what are we going to do?” He asked tentatively, his paw stopping to cup her chin so their eyes could meet.

“We?” She asked, sitting up to reach for another cigarette, apparently unashamed of her nudity. “Well. If they want to, Kolya and Mikhail can race tonight. Or they can drink themselves home. But either way, I’m racing tonight, and I’ll need a pack mule.” Force-of-Nature Blair was back and balancing a cigarette in her lips as she spoke. Toretto laughed.

“I’ll be your pack mule any time.” He removed the cigarette so he could kiss the lips that had caressed it.

“But right now I really need a shower and to get dressed, Mr. Toretto.” She stood, reclaiming her cigarette with her usual sly look. Blair slipped into the robe she had worn the night before and blew out of the room like a whirlwind, leaving a near-empty bottle of vodka and a matching set of lingerie in her wake.

Hours later, Blair reemerged from her hotel room in a lacy, caramel-colored, three-quarter sleeved shift dress, a pair of black tights and her signature black heels. Her long hair hung in curls down her back; it bounced as she began to bang on the doors of her remaining drivers. Dominic stuck his head out of his door, wearing only his jeans.

“Good evening, Clarice,” He murmured, watching as Blair waited rather impatiently at the doors of the other two drivers.

“Get dressed!” She snapped; his eyes went immediately to the set of keys and box of cigarettes she held in her hand. The racing, it seemed, was going to be on her schedule. “Mikhail! Kolya! I swear to God!” She set off on a tirade of curses in languages Dominic couldn’t even identify as he returned to his dresser to retrieve a shirt, his thick wool coat and his keys. She was a mystery, the little firecracker - running to hide in his arms one moment and nearly snapping his neck the next. The burly man left his room yet again, obediently following the clicking of heels on the marble floor down into the lobby behind Kolya and Mikhail - who both looked quite disheveled.

Toretto was startled when Blair failed to pause at the doors of the lobby for him and the other two, as she normally would have; she was already in her car driving away when he reached the door of the Saleen. Kolya raced off into the darkness behind her, Mikhail in close second. With a sigh, Dominic turned the key in the ignition and took off with a roar of the 620 horses under the hood of the black Mustang.

Blair combed her bright curls back from her face as she exited her car, stretching her legs among the throngs of scantily clad girls- she wondered if the girl Vladimir had at the Hotel the day before was among the many faces in the crowd. Pushing thoughts of the dead from her mind, Blair approached the nearest man surrounded by girls - a tall, blond man named Jyrki - and began to negotiate the racing for the night. The Brit had already decided that Kolya was to be the mule, and that she and Dominic would have to race multiple heats in order to make up for the money lost on the Lexus that burned the night before.

After a short conversation with Jyrki in Finnish, Blair shouldered the black purse she always carried the money in and turned to see Dominic’s Saleen parked next to the M3 - the burly man leaned against the driver’s door of his car wearing the aviator shades Blair had gotten for him while blocking the advances of several small, drunken-looking girls. With a sigh, the redhead lit a cigarette as she walked over, noting where Kolya and Mikhail had parked as she did so.

Dominic watched her storm up out of the corner of his eye - the little girl could turn heads with ease, that was certain - catching the flick of two fingers in Kolya’s direction, enough to send him jogging from his car towards her. She could command damn attention, too. Toretto dismissed the girls who swarmed him with a wave, turning openly toward Blair now.

“Well?” He asked as Blair held the purse out to Kolya, who looked relieved to be stripped of his driving duties for the evening.

“I’m going to race.” As she perched on the hood of the Saleen, Blair scanned the crowd for the racers she was pitted against. It seemed to Toretto as if she knew every name, every racer at every race they attended. She didn’t scope out the cars as most racers would - no, Blair believed knowing what was under an opponent’s hood as an unfair advantage - instead, Blair observed the behaviors of the drivers.

“How many runs?” Toretto noted the drivers she was eyeing, watching as she breathed in the smoke from her cigarette.

“Three.” Dominic’s eyes widened as that telltale wry grin spread over Blair’s face. “Oh, don’t worry honey; you’re in three heats as well. Just not against me.”

“When?” The muscled man had noticed Kolya and Mikhail getting into their cars and proceeding to the finish line as Blair had taught them to, and turned to the Brit as she slid off the hood of his car, crushing her cigarette with a thin stiletto heel.

“Now.” She handed him a piece of paper with three numbers written on it before she crawled into her car.

The first two heats Blair had entered Dominic in were easy enough, as were her own. They easily won both - Blair clutched the pink slip and keys to a dark blue Escalade.

“What are you going to do with that?” Toretto asked as Blair pointed out the drivers for his last race.

“Sell it.” She shrugged, and lit another cigarette. She had taken to smoking a lot more in the past day or so, she had sent Kolya to a nearby corner store for a carton of Marlboro Reds. Blair smacked Toretto’s stomach with her right hand while breathing from one of the new cigarettes. “Now go, you’re up next.”

Dominic’s blunt fingers reached to caress her cheek, but Blair deftly ducked out of the way to discuss her last race in Finnish with one of the disgruntled-looking loser - probably the one who lost his car, Toretto thought as he climbed into his car and sped off.

The race was always the best ten seconds of Toretto’s life - the more he could do in one night, the better. The money was good, no doubt, but Dominic Toretto hadn’t started racing for the money; it was the rush that got him, the feeling he got as he idled up to the crudely-spray painted starting line of a quarter-mile track, the flash of buildings and other people’s cars as he blew past them in the inside corner of the ninety-seven degree turn in the Fin’s track, the laugh that tore itself from his throat when he won.

For Blair, however, racing had been born of necessity and formed an addiction. Instead of turning tricks as many of her peers had, she had turned to street racing to make her money. She had slowly been sucked into the street-racing life, all of the things for which Toretto had started racing. The money she earned now was an exorbitant perk, one that came from many years of hard work and many failed attempts to figure out the scene. Blair not only knew the scene, she mused as she taxied up to the starting line immediately after Dominic’s heat for the last high-grossing race of the night, and she controlled it like putty in her hands.

The redhead’s bare foot tickled the gas pedal as she waited for the flag girls to assemble themselves, her hand rested lightly on the soft leather of the gearshift. A cigarette dangled from her lips - she didn’t deem it necessary to refrain from smoking in her racing car, it helped calm her nerves - and her fast-paced racing playlist blared through the superior speaker system of the BMW. The flag girls paced back and forth before the line of five cars and for a single second before they brought the starting flag down, Blair wondered how much damage it would do to her car and her reputation if she were to hit one of them.

But once the flag came down, all of those thoughts were gone. Actually, all thoughts were gone - Blair was one with her machine, feeling when the perfect time to shift and pass was. She never breathed for the ten seconds of a race - just let the music and her car take her to the starting line, where she skidded to a halt before taking a deep breath and locating the losers pf the race for payment and her boys for congratulations.

After Blair’s race, they returned to the hotel for one more night’s rest. The next morning, the convicts returned to the Compound with their spoils.


	12. Let Go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Let Go by Frou Frou

“Let me see those scars, Dominic,” Blair beckoned the burly man to the side of the pool where she sat, dangling her feet into the water. She and Mia had been sunning themselves in the summer “heat” while Dominic and Brian threw things such as beach and volleyballs at each other in the large pool on the roof of the mansion. Other people were on the roof as well - a few tattooed men drank beers and reminisced about weeks on the beach in Cancun or some place similar before they ran to the Compound, and a few of the Compound’s less butch females were on the roof admiring the shirtless men.

Blair sucked greedily off her cigarette as Dominic splashed over to her, holding his hands out for his Corona and lime like a small child would for a cookie and a glass of milk. The Brit smiled as he wrapped a tattoo-covered arm around her small waist, a smile that turned into a frown and finally a shriek of panic as Dominic launched her through the air and into the pool. She hit the water with a dull thwap! and a splash which caused Mia to shout angrily from her dry poolside perch.

“What the hell, Dominic!” The little redhead screeched as soon as her head broke the surface, her hair dripping down her face in a solid mass. She flipped it back angrily, eliciting an out-of-character tirade of curses as her English Cosmopolitan magazine was wetted again.

“Watch it you two, these things are like Gold! I can’t read Russian you know!” Mia reprimanded the two like children while she pulled her chair as far back out of the splash zone as she could. Blair and Toretto locked eyes for a moment before they began to giggle. Brian scooped Blair’s ruined cigarette from the water and dumped it on the brick that lined the pool as the redhead slowly made her way back to Dominic and where she had been sitting.

“Sorry Mia,” Toretto called as he lifted Blair back out of the water, blinking as she squeezed the water from her hair out onto his face as he lifted his body to kiss her cheek.

“Now may I see your back?” Blair asked, shaking her mane back behind her back while Dominic obediently turned around before him. She ran her hand over the sinuous, Saleen Mustang Hood-shaped scar that ran from shoulder to shoulder across Dominic’s upper back - the only remains of the terrible but timely and useful accident in the garage. She traced the new scar, sending a shiver down Dominic’s back as he moved away from the little redhead to evade a thrown volleyball from Brian.

As the two men swore at each other, Blair extracted herself from the pool and walked over to where Mia lay with the Cosmo. She wrapped her white towel around her waist and laid down in the chair next to Mia, squeezing all of the excess moisture out of her long hair before looking over her friend, who regarded her with a raised eyebrow.

“What?” Blair asked, taking a sip of vodka from her signature glass tumbler, which she chased with a breath of smoke.

“You so have him eating out of your hand, Blair!” Blair feigned confusion, looking around as if she didn’t know who was eating from her hand. Her mismatched eyes touched on the muscular man in the pool, a Corona in one hand, his other arm cocked back with the volleyball to lob at Spillner and a goofy grin plastered on his face.

“He’s not over Letty yet. Or else he would be eating out of more than my hands -”

“Oh God Blair, too much information!” Mia interjected, following Blair’s gaze past Dominic to Spillner, who had just been conked in the head by the volleyball and was recovering by throwing a soaked tennis ball, which sank upon contact with the water.

“What makes you think he wants me, anyway?” Blair mused, drinking from her tumbler again while she slid the Cosmo magazine from Mia’s hands to read.

“The way he looks at you like you’re about the most beautiful car he’s seen in his life,” Mia shrugged, taking Blair’s cigarette for a quick puff while Brian looked away.

“What a naughty girl,” Blair attempted to change the subject while looking over swimsuit trends for much warmer climes than Russia. She was nearly shivering in her garnet-colored bikini, especially since she had been so unceremoniously thrown into the water.

“You’re one to talk.” Mia threw her luscious brown locks over her shoulder. For a moment, jealousy reared its ugly hand as she compared Mia’s effortlessly tan and fit body to her own mercilessly thin and pale one, but only for a moment. “Look, Blair, I just don’t want you to take advantage of him. My brother’s a delicate creature.”

“Who’s a delicate creature?” Dominic called from the nearest edge of the pool where his head was propped on his arms. “What’re we doing tonight, Blair?”

“You have an awful lot of questions for someone you just threw into the pool,” The Brit replied with a shiver, wrapping her towel tighter around her body.

“Well, Spillner here is out of commission, so let’s get you out of the cold.” Toretto didn’t notice as Blair and Mia exchanged glances, he simply began guiding Blair along as she scrambled to grab her cigarettes, drink, bottle of vodka, and hand Mia the Cosmopolitan all at once. “So what are we going to do,” He asked once the pair was descending the staircase to Blair’s floor. Her tiny feet pattered wetly against the floor as she desperately tried to keep up with the hand that guided her by the small of her back.

“Slow down Toretto, why so hasty?” Blair murmured, taking a drag of her cigarette. “I have a new shipment due out on Monday and another new round of cars in the Monday after.” She sighed, thinking of all the work she was currently putting off by lounging around by the pool in the beautiful weather. “Would you like to learn to fireproof cars or go into town and drink?”

“Both?” Dominic asked as Blair handed him the tumbler and bottle of Vodka in order to fiddle with the key of her door. Once inside the warmth of her rooms, Blair dropped the towel on the floor in favor of finding an ashtray for her burning cigarette. Seconds after she had she set her cigarette down in the blue and white china tray; Dominic’s hands were on Blair’s small shoulders, his calloused fingers caressing her back.

“Dominic,” Blair murmured, her neck rolling backwards at his touch. His lips met the curve over her collarbone, one hand holding her neck while the other rested on her stomach. “Dominic,” This time her voice was more stern - Toretto stopped kissing her clavicle to look into Blair’s mismatched eyes.

“What, Blair?” He backed away while Blair turned to face him and perch atop the dark granite counter.

“Aren’t you the same man who told me you probably weren’t over Letty?” Her eyes were piercing, her tone harsh as she questioned him; Toretto couldn’t help but regretting that bit of information slip. He crossed muscular arms over his bare and equally as muscular chest - Blair had a habit of noting details like that about the burly man before her. Even balanced as she was atop the tall counter, he was still a head taller than she was. “Well?”

Dominic shuffled his feet uncomfortably and leaned against the counter of the little Island in the middle of the kitchen, cursing when he smashed his head into a pan hanging above the stove. “Why the fuck do you even have these if you never use them?” He asked as he rubbed the back of his head. Blair remained glaring and sullen as ever.

“Don’t change the subject, Dominic.”

“Why, you do all the time.” Ouch. Blair turned her gaze to the mirror in the corner, where she could see and gauge his reactions without him seeing hers.

“I always answer your fucking questions eventually. But this is a little more important.” She murmured, watching his chocolate brown eyes darken as his brow drew over them. “Well?”

“You’re a trip.” Toretto moved to the fridge and drew out not a bottle of Corona but the Vodka from the freezer. He poured it into the glass tumbler Blair had been using and took a hearty swig. For a moment, Blair’s eyes widened in shock - she had never seen him drink anything but Coronas and water. Sure, she had her signature drink of Vodka on the rocks, but to see Dominic drinking hard liquor? He sighed and banged the glass down on the table to refill it. “I mean, you want me then you don’t. You say I can’t race for you then you say I’m your prizewinner. You wanted me to change how I look and now you won’t even look at me!” His hand was on her chin then, forcing her head around to face him. “Fucking look at me Blair!”

She did look at him, tentatively glancing in his direction before she let her eyes slide to meet his for the first time in minutes. Her hand lifted to rest lightly upon his, as she wondered inwardly if alcohol would make the burly man in a fight. While she might be able to hold her own normally, Blair knew there was no way for her to take out a drunken man behind a locked door.

“Could you expect me not to want you the way you play me like a fiddle?” Dominic drew his face in to hers for a brief moment before he realized that he was frightening her, at which point he pulled away from her, looking away toward the fridge as she had earlier. Blair’s hands remained clasped in her lap; her thumb nails digging painfully into the sides of her hands as she attempted to keep the cold composure that was her trademark. Lightly, she slid from the counter and reached to twine her long, thin fingers with his thick, calloused ones.

“Dominic, I -”

“Don’t finish that though. Please.” But Blair knew she needed to finish the thought - with her free hand on his chest for balance, Blair reached up to touch her lips lightly to his. At first, Toretto tensed, and Blair feared he would pull away from him, but after a brief second his free hand twined through her long red hair.

“I’m afraid of being hurt,” She finished, breathing into the hollow between his chin and his shoulder where she had managed to nuzzle her face. Toretto was startled at how easily she could change his emotions - from outraged to cuddly in a matter of seconds. He enjoyed the way her chin felt as it dug into his collarbone, her soft breath on his neck.

“Blair,” He tilted her chin as to angle her face to him. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” The smile that shined up from her bright face to him was genuine, he could tell, and it wiped away any trace of anger. Toretto craned his neck to crush their lips together once more. “About those Mafia cars?” He asked after a few tentative seconds. Blair grinned.

“You’ll have to let me get dressed, honey.” Blair laughed and pulled away, her arm trailing behind her where her fingers were still locked with his.

“Can I watch?” He looked hopeful.

“Get yourself a Corona and hold your horses.” She grinned before disappearing into her bedroom. Toretto did as he was told - finding himself a new Corona before pouring a glass of Vodka on the rocks with a touch of olive juice for Blair when she emerged. He stood her box of Marlboro’s on the table next to the new drink and waited, beer in hand. After a few minutes of waiting, Toretto heard a dull thud and a curse from inside the bedroom.

“Screw this,” He breathed and took a giant sip of his beer for encouragement before getting to his feet - her drink and the box of cigarettes in the same hand that he gripped the Corona bottle by the neck. Dominic lumbered over to the door and listened with his ear pressed to the thick wood for a moment before he tapped the smooth surface lightly with his free hand. He could hear Blair freeze - he could nearly see the startled look on her face - then scramble for a moment before he turned the handle and allowed himself in to Blair’s bedroom.

Blair’s room was pristine - not a pillow out of place except for the heavy-looking crystal vase on the thick carpet that had apparently caused the thump Dominic had heard from the living room. She had apparently made the enormous four-posted bed after she got out of it that morning, the plush wine-colored comforter made Toretto want to throw himself atop it. But he refrained, setting her crystal tumbler down on the dresser by the door as he watched the tiny redhead flit in and out of her closet in her usual matching set of lingerie and a pair of black thigh-high tights.

“What?” The little redhead finally turned toward the muscular man who hovered by her doorway, her bright eyes fixing not on him but the box of cigarettes in his hand. Dominic watched her as she unconsciously straightened the comforter and pulled back one of the hanging gauze curtains back more securely.

“I brought you your drink.” Toretto shrugged, his muscular shoulders rolling gently beneath his shirt. He noticed that she had taken out all of her earrings, he could practically see through the first two 00-sized holes in her head. Tentatively, he held the drink out to her as she pulled a high-waisted skirt up her lithe torso before crossing the room to seize the tumbler to take an enormous swig.

“Thank you.” She set the crystal back on the dresser as she pulled open a drawer to retrieve a white blouse that was neatly folded there.

“Why get all dressed up and fancy,” Dominic set his beer down, his hands gently took the blouse from hers to set it back in the drawer. “When you know I’m just going to take it all back off you?” He asked, his hands gently unzipping the back of the high-waisted skirt. Blair’s breath caught in her throat, but she allowed herself to fall into Toretto’s thick arms, her lips searching for his neck, his face, anything not covered by the fabric of his black t-shirt.

She couldn’t help but wonder - as he wrestled with her skirt and she with his shirt - why she would let the muscled man do this to her time and time again (for she knew it would happen again and again). He could admit he wasn’t over Letty, yet she’d still let him sleep with her. The image of composure and control was gone as Dominic finally got to throw himself down on her wine colored comforter with her body beneath his, as they writhed in the throes of passion once more.


	13. Dangerous Kind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Dangerous Kind by The Rasmus

“How naughty of you,” The tiny redhead traced the lines of Dominic’s rough-hewn abs as he rolled her stockings back up her legs to secure them to her light-colored garters.

“What?” A pair of chocolate brown eyes met a mismatched set of green and blue, Blair’s usual glare was soft and relaxed as she lit a cigarette.

“We’re supposed to be down at the garage, bulletproofing cars. I do have to work sometimes, you know, it’s not a permanent vacation here,” She chuckled as his fingers tickled the tops of her thighs.

“Oh, I’m sorry Ms. Hundley, for interrupting your rigorous work schedule,” Toretto’s deep, raspy voice was thick with sarcasm, and interrupted by their brief kisses. Blair reached for her ringing cell phone on the bedside table as Dominic went back to his feeble attempts at fastening a garter strap to a thigh high - he could take apart and re-assemble an entire car engine, but a tiny little clasp like the one on the end of her underwear was beyond him.

“Blair Hundley.” She answered the phone, waving his hands away from her midsection as she sat up, a hand pushing her loose curls back from her face as she listened to the rapid Russian on the other line. She replied in the same language, glancing at Dominic as she stood and crossed the room to where a pad of paper and a pen lay on the otherwise empty dresser top. She scribbled as she spoke, taking a brief moment to take a hearty swig from the tumbler of vodka Toretto had brought for her. Dominic became bored watching the tiny redhead write and talk and began to dress himself again; silently he slid one of her necklaces - a delicate silver thing with a blue glass heart dangling from it - from her bedside table and fastened it around his neck before he pulled his shirt over his buzzed head.

Blair set her cell phone down then, and reached for the cream-colored blouse she had been attempting to retrieve before she had been distracted.

“What is it?” Toretto asked, offering her the high-waisted skirt she had been wearing.

“Well,” She pulled her hair from the neckline of her shirt before she buttoned it from bottom to top, holding out her hand impatiently for the skirt. “I have another offer for a shipment. They have more money on it too.” Blair sighed, taking another deep draught of the vodka, emptying it. “The problem is... I don’t think I have enough cars.”

“Oh. Business.” Blair nodded as she shimmied her way up into her skirt - how she always managed to look so put together on such short notice the muscle man would never know. She brushed a touch of mascara across each set of eyelashes before she reached her hand out to his, her cigarettes, a lighter, the paper she had written on and her cell phone in the other.

“Business you’re going to help me with. Let’s go,” She motioned to her keys as she took his hand, they left the room quickly to sweep down staircases. The clicking of Blair’s heels drew Kolya and Mikhail from their rooms as the pair blew past on their way down to the garage.

“Blair?” Kolya called from behind the pair. Blair motioned him to her side.

“We have another shipment.” She murmured to him as the burly man fell in step beside her. Mikhail flanked Toretto’s left side; both men had noted their clasped hands, Toretto was certain. He couldn’t help but wonder if the other two cared - if she had treated them as she treated him at one point. Blair was strange like that… Dominic sighed as he made a slight alteration to the thought; Blair was somewhat slut-like; he simply wouldn’t concede to the fact that she might be a female player or something in that genre.

That thought occurred before he glanced over at Blair just in time to catch one of the adoring looks she shot him when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. Dominic smiled and squeezed her hand tightly, zeroing back in on the conversation at hand.

“- enough cars.” Mikhail was muttering from Toretto’s left.

“I know we don’t have enough cars. Get me Brian, Antony and…” She paused for a moment, as if considering something. “Get me Andre as well. And I guess get Gil if Andre is coming along.” Blair tucked the piece of paper into her waistband as she came to a stop at the top of a staircase, stopping Toretto with her.

“What are you going to pull?” Kolya’s tone was hushed, and he glanced around surreptitiously as if there could be a concealed cop around any corner.

“You know what I’m going to pull. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ve done this before.”

“Not without Vladimir!” He was less quiet now. Blair’s grip on Toretto’s hand became tense for a moment as she breathed gently through her nose to calm her temper.

“But we have Toretto now. Enough for four teams.” She sighed and turned, tugging Toretto along with her as she called back to the bewildered pair on the stairs. “Meet me at the garage. Hurry up, Dominic, there‘s a bit we need to discuss.”

“Like what?” He watched as Blair swept into the driver’s seat of the black Range Rover - the car she used for the sole purpose of getting to and from the Compound from the Garage and vice versa. Quickly, he clambered into the passenger’s seat, feeling like the bitch as she removed her right shoe to drive.

“How we’re going to pull this off. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make you squeamish, am I right?” Dominic nodded, bewildered at how fast Blair went from being couple-like to captain-in-command. “Well, we’ll have to locate and lift the cars, then bulletproof, tint and enhance them all before Monday - because I fucking left the other shipment off until the last minute like an idiot,” She sighed, taking the hairpin turn towards the garage.

“And how exactly do you do this?”

“Well, I guess it’s not all thievery and falsehoods,” The garage’s door lifted slowly before them, and Toretto waited patiently for the answer he knew was coming. “I call a few people I know who check around at the races, if the car is there and it’s someone who I know, I’ll offer to buy it from them for a nominal fee. Mercedes. They always want fucking Mercedes.” Blair shrugged as she guided the Range Rover into the lift.

“Sounds like you’re trying to make up for the thievery and falsehoods,” Toretto commented, and glanced at Blair’s hand, at the cluster of three bluish dots which hovered by her hand. She knew the game, he could assume. Anyone who had done any sort of hard time did.

“I guess so.” Blair finally said, as she crawled out of the car, leaving Toretto alone with his thoughts. Jacking cars and selling them to the Mafia? She had mentioned it before, but the muscle-bound driver had never thought he’d get to see the Russian form of Grand Theft Auto in action. What did she want him for anyway, to be her wing man? Dominic had thought Blair would be the first to know that he was no good at following people’s lead when it came to any sort of heist - he was always large and in-charge. He looked forlornly out the window as Blair punched the button for the lift, watching the creases in the cinderblock walls pass them by quietly as the lift rattled its way down the oversized shaft.

“Well? Are you ready and willing, or would you like to head back to the Compound?” Blair asked as she clambered back into the tall Range Rover, vacating the lift for the use of the others who she was certain would follow. She didn’t understand the look of concern on Toretto’s face - hadn’t she read him right, hadn’t he been involved in that gas-truck-jacking ring in the Dominican Republic? He had been in charge of that shit, if she recalled correctly. Why would lifting a few Mercedes in Estonia make him squeamish?

“I’d like to know more about your system. Why would you need me?” Toretto followed Blair to the nearest car - a Lexus LS 460 Sedan. It was black, as all of Blair’s cars were, with tint on the windows which was nearly the same color as the chassis. The car’s doors lay on the nearby workbench, several thick, curved plates of steel lay on the bench beside the doors.

“Normally, my racing team is involved with this in order to support the exorbitant fees which sometimes accumulate with our dirty habit.” Blair shrugged as she picked up a screwdriver in her slender hand and began to attack the driver’s side door, separating the lining of the door and its mechanical workings from the chassis with practiced ease.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Toretto watched, and leaned against the bench Blair worked on.

“I need your help.” Blair set her screwdriver down on the workbench and carefully lifted the insides of the door wholly away from the chassis, and set it down beside the thing before she carefully proffered the black outer shell and placed it gently against one of the pieces of steel. “Since Vladimir is gone, we are one short of a full team. And I thought that with your background, you’d be a perfect candidate to help.” She turned to face Toretto. “It’s just a few cars, Toretto; I didn’t think you’d be so worked up about it.”

“I’m not worked up!” He leaned and seized the steel slab the chassis of the door was leaning against, and pulled it away from the rest so Blair could better attach the pieces together. She shot him a look before she crouched, balancing on her toes to finish the final few screws on the bottom - she was nearly underneath the workbench.

“You are,” Blair wrapped the car door with a cloth and directed Toretto to a foam cut out sort of thing where he should set it. The sound of the lift clattering down the shaft filled the garage as Dominic set the heavy steel down on the floor. Toretto watched as Blair clicked her way across the concrete to an adjacent room - strange, because Dominic had thought that the main, expansive room of the garage was the only part of the garage. Pretty self-explanatory, he thought. But he also thought that she would have him jacking cars by this point and not re-assembling parts of high-end cars for the mafia.

Toretto turned the final screw of the bulletproofed door before the lift finally rattled to a stop - he began work on a second door, seeing that there was probably no other use for him. Kolya, Mikhail, and a few other men Dominic recognized from the Compound - the first two vanished into the same room Blair had disappeared to, and the four men Toretto didn’t recognize set to work on a set of cars as he was - a Jaguar XJ, a Bentley Continental Flying Spur, and a Cadillac CTS-V.

He had almost finished the last door for the car, and was wondering how he was supposed to attach them to the car (because regular door hinges couldn’t possibly support the weight of the steel-reinforced doors) when Blair stuck her head out the door of the adjacent room. Toretto had never heard such a grating call.

“Toretto!” He turned the last screw, and stood to follow the wisp of Blair’s long red hair as she disappeared around the door frame.

Blair stood in the center of the room on an advanced-looking computer, Kolya was at her shoulder and she dictated to Mikhail, who recorded into a black composition book.

“What’s all this?” Toretto settled into an ancient-looking armchair, one leg flung over an arm.

“This,” Blair paused her dictation to Mikhail on car specs and turned, a cigarette in hand. “Is Kolya’s masterpiece. He managed to hack in to the dealership databases of every car dealership in Russia and the Bloc that has sold a high-end car to anyone in the recent months, and their records of those sales.” Blair grinned wryly and took a drag of her cigarette. “This way, we can track the owner of each one of those cars, see if they still have them, lift if we must, charge a nominal fee if we can. And we can track specific models and such.”

“That’s genius!” Toretto was on his feet, looking over Blair’s shoulder.

“Would you like to dictate?” She took Mikhail’s spot, he left to go assemble doors, hoods, or a roof, Toretto figured.

“I. Guess.”

“Good. We’re looking for Rolls-Royce Phantoms, Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG, Cadillac CTS-V’s and a few more Lexus LS 640’s.” Blair sat with the pen in her hand, blowing smoke as she spoke. Toretto nodded, and as Kolya typed and scrolled, Toretto scanned each page, calling out Make, Model, Owner and Location. If Blair wanted more, she would ask for a phone number and an address, which she copied shorthand.

“How are we supposed to acquire all of these cars?” Kolya laughed as he left the room, clapping Toretto on the back.

“Hard work.”

“We only need twelve cars, Kolya, don’t frighten him!” Blair threw back her hair to laugh, and crushed her cigarette out as she looked at the list in her hands. Half of it was written in Mikhail’s Cyrillic-looking characters, the other half in Blair’s beautiful cursive. She picked up a hi-liter and began to narrow down the list from nearly two-hundred cars to just fifty, and from there, she circled the twelve cars she believed to be their best picks.

“Are you in?” She asked; a hand brushed through Dominic’s generous growth of black hair, her eyes piercing.

How could he say no?


	14. High on the Crime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: High in the Crime by Turnonegro

Blair woke the next morning and dressed as usual, poured herself a drink and lit a cigarette. She smoothed the bottom of a turquoise blouse against her skinny-legged black jeans and unconsciously clicked her thin heels against the beautiful mahogany floor impatiently as she waited for Toretto to knock on her door. She took a drag from her cigarette while she surveyed in front of the fridge before the knock came.

“Come in,” She called as she pulled out a piece of lime to suck on for a moment. Dominic let himself in, and took the cigarette from her hand to take a drag. “Excuse me?” Toretto grinned impishly.

“I guess I’m just excited. When do we leave? What are we doing first?” It was Blair’s turn to smile, stealing her cigarette back from Toretto. She pocketed her pack of fags, her cell phone, and a car key. “Which car?”

“The M7.” Blair followed him out of her apartments, and the pair proceeded down the hall to the garage. The mansion’s hallways were empty so early in the morning - even though it was nearly nine o’clock, the riff raff that lived in the Compound didn’t usually rise until noon.

“Can I have a cigarette?”

“What made you turn into a child?” Blair snapped as she lowered herself into the driver’s side of the car. “Besides, smoking is bad for you.” She grinned as the engine revved to life. Zero to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds, Blair was on the autobahn before Dominic considered speaking again.

“So what are we going to do first?” He wondered aloud as he considered the itinerary he and Blair had discussed with Mikhail and Kolya over a hefty bottle of Finlandia Vodka. Each team of two people was in charge of acquiring three cars for the total of twelve that they needed. Toretto and Blair had decided that Blair be in charge of the negotiation of the sale of the single car that Blair was going to have to buy. Most of her choices, the cars Blair had picked out as easy targets, were the cars they would be pursuing - all except the one car that Blair was to negotiate a settlement for.

“It makes me feel better about myself,” She had said to him after she took a long draught of vodka. “To do the negotiations. Less like I‘m taking too much and not giving enough back, you know? There‘s always a balance.” Blair was a strange bird, that was certain; ride or die until the end, but extremely subject to that guilty feeling anyone except the most hardened of criminals tended to develop when their livelihood was based off crime.

“We’re going to go to Moscow and get the CTS-V.” Blair shrugged, and pulled in to a small gas station. She left Toretto to pump while she bought the crappy coffee inside the station.

“That’s going to be a trip, by the way,” She handed Toretto a “venti” sized coffee before she climbed into the driver’s seat. “Getting that car. I have a spare keyless remote that usually opens the doors to Caddies like that one - I thank God for the man who invented keyless entry, made my life easier, - but sometimes it’s a bit dodgy and it doesn’t work. Luckily enough, I have this…” She had rummaged through the glove compartment of the M7 as she drove, and finally pulled out a small, black box of a device and proffered it to Toretto as she drove away.

“It’s a security system jammer. Who would have known that Kolya was such a technological genius, right?” She smiled wryly before she took a sip of her coffee and lit a cigarette. “It works on every single security alarm I’ve ever encountered since he made it - even house alarms. As long as I have it on me, I can surreptitiously break the window and climb right in.”

“Then what?” Toretto asked as he fiddled with the nondescript black box - he turned it over and over again in his hardened hands, as he observed the exemplary (and strange) craftsmanship. Kolya, he thought, was a genius.

“Well, we’ll have to drive home separately, then we’ll go ‘negotiate’ the sale of a certain Rolls-Royce Phantom. I’m sure that Ivan is looking forward to seeing me in the next couple days. He’s under the impression that I have stolen his cars before.” She shrugged as she grinned brightly. “I wonder what on earth gave him that impression.” And after all that - after we get the Rolls back to the Compound - it’s off to inner-city Tver to get the Jag I found there. That won’t be too difficult."

“So what happens if the police catch us? If one of your little devices doesn’t work?” Toretto asked as he finished his coffee. “Do I drive this car, or the other one?” Blair lifted an eyebrow at his surplus of questions, and took a sip of her coffee before she spoke.

“Well. The police won’t catch us, because I do believe you are faster than them.” She paused, as if considering what she had just condemned them to, and beat her knuckles against the mahogany wood dash accents three times. “Just don’t get caught. You hear sirens, you split; I can fend for myself. Just don’t go back to the Compound if you have cops on your ass - they would love to find that fucking place, I’m sure.” Blair sighed as she progressed from a stoplight to fifth gear with ease as she took the sloping ramp to the autobahn - she passed by cars as if they stood still. “I know you know all of that jazz, you were in the American Street Racing Scene. Isn’t that all just getting busted by cops?” Really, Toretto thought mildly, her subtle jabs at his past were getting old. Just because she knew everything about him and him next to nothing about her…

“How do we stay in touch?” He asked, and was directed to the center console as Blair blasted between two semi-trucks before she cut in front of another to avoid a back-end collision with an itty-bitty Ferrari. Toretto had a white-knuckle hold on what he liked to call the “Oh Shit Grip,” the little handle which hung above the passenger’s door. Normally, her balls-to-the-wall driving style wouldn’t have bothered him in the least, but his adrenaline rush was saving itself for the event to come. Blair had pulled out a set of Bluetooth-compatible ear pieces; she handed one to Dominic before she affixed her own to her left ear, adjusting it just so.

“Great, but I don’t have a cell phone here.” Blair spared Toretto a glance, and wondered if the muscle man was ever going to stop doubting her system and just trust her.

“The M does.” She said, and took a swig of her rapidly cooling coffee as she steered precariously with her knees through the heavy traffic. Blair scowled darkly at the temperature of the coffee and unceremoniously tossed it out the window as they rounded a bend in the never ending road. Toretto watched, and wondered weather she would give him more information about what they were about to do.

He had gathered that she was going to be the one to actually steal the car - what with her state-of-the-art gadgetry and all of that shit. Whatever happened, he wondered, to breaking a fucking window and jump-starting the car with to fucking pieces of wire?

“Then, darling, God gave us the keyless system. Everything runs on frequencies now - with enough trial and error, everyone can figure out how to swindle a keyless.” Toretto watched as the speedometer passed one hundred miles per hour and made its way up to nearly one hundred fifty miles per hour as Blair sped past a line of stopped cars - nearly on the shoulder of the highway.

Toretto leaned back in his seat and let his eyes slide closed; before he knew it, he awoke in Moscow. Blair had stopped again for coffee, and was taking an enormous swig of hers as she shook him awake, her fiery hair gleamed in the sunlight.

“Let’s go honey, we don’t want to be late, do we?” She motioned for him to exit the passenger’s seat in favor of driving - which Toretto had no qualms. Blair settled herself into his warmed seat without a word, her mismatched eyes scanned the road as Toretto followed the explicit directions of the GPS - directions which Blair must have entered while he had been asleep. Toretto could feel the slow build of the adrenaline in his veins - stealing a car was just like racing to him, one facilitated another. He felt the same anticipation building up in him as he would have during a race - the feeling that he might not win, might not pull off the jacking was exhilarating rather than nauseating, as many would say.

Blair felt similar to the brawny man, but in her own little British way. She thrived when faced with a challenge - and nothing was more challenging than pulling off a heist right in the owner’s front yard. She watched as Toretto’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel, waited in anticipation as he parallel parked across the street from their target. It was a quiet street - Blair had noticed, as she wondered if she would have preferred a busy area to a peaceful village with neighbors in tow. But she knew from her research that this neighborhood was filled with businessmen who worked during the day and with people who would “summer” in Moscow - and since it wasn’t quite summer yet, that meant that the majority of the houses had to be empty.

She turned on her Bluetooth device as she exited the car - the alarm-jamming device was in her purse, and she clutched a few hefty books to her chest so that she would look more official. The telltale click of the locks on the Cadillac caused a wry grin to slide across her face, as she kept Dominic updated with a stream of English - a language not usually used in Moscow.

“We’re in.”

Blair pulled open the driver’s door - she had a bit of difficulty juggling her “things” - and clambered into the low-profile vehicle; she couldn’t help but wonder why she wore heels to a heist as she pulled off her right shoe in order to press on the brake to start the keyless with the push of a button. The engine of the CTS-V roared to life, and with a bright smile, Blair instructed Toretto to “Drive.” He grunted over the line - she left in one direction down the street, he in the other.

The tiny redhead had to remind herself to relax as her grip tightened on the steering wheel - being tense didn’t help her precision driving any, and she needed to be at her best doing something like this. A bright flashing light caught her attention - a cop who had pulled over some poor drunken sod on a motorbike - and Blair cursed herself as she nearly ran a red light into oncoming traffic in her distraction.

Toretto heard the screech of the Cadillac’s tires on the ground form his place in the line of traffic. He had been instructed to remain a few cars back, and the pair kept contact to a minimum until they were out of the city and on their way back to the Compound. As a precaution, Blair hadn’t programmed the route back to the mansions and instead had taught it to Toretto - he had practically studied it and could recite each turn from the Moscow Autobahn to the Compound by heart - lest he be pulled over by the police with the information still in his GPS. No precaution was too great for Blair, it seemed; which was the exact opposite of how Toretto usually rolled. He would make a plan, hope it worked, and if the cops showed or the plan went south, he would “wing it.” Blair, he saw, despised the phrase - every meticulous detail of the trip had to be perfect.

“How’re you up there?” The burly man called through his Bluetooth device, as he noticed what had caught Blair’s eye.

“The police distracted me. Drunk man on a scooter.” He could almost see Blair’s embarrassed shrug through the tinted windows of both cars as his lane of traffic moved past the stationary Cadillac. Toretto ran a hand over his bristly head - he felt the sweat begin to build under his new growth of hair. Appalled, he reached for the black, folded bandanna he had left in the passenger’s seat when he had switched seats with Blair and at the next stoplight he tried it over his temples to avert the slow drip of sweat which trickled down his forehead toward his eyes.

“Just be careful.” He cautioned - he knew she was all too aware of the consequences of their actions, that much was apparent by the trio of Indian Ink dots she carried between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

Toretto could barely prevent a sigh of relief as Blair shot up the ramp to the autobahn. He followed at a similar speed - breakneck was nothing to the M7, he was surprised to find. Toretto had become fond of the German engineering; he was appalled to admit the fact, but it was true. As he wondered when he would finally be able to take the Bluetooth device from his ear, Blair gave him the all-clear to proceed directly back to the Compound as quickly as possible. Relieved, Dominic laid his foot down on the pedal and let the lead weight of his foot carry him through traffic. The car was responsive, it reacted beneath his fingertips as if his wish were its command - a certain electricity chafed his tired palms as Toretto guided the BMW through the heavy mid-afternoon traffic.

Soon, he had caught up with Blair, who barreled along down the street as quickly as the very heavy CTS-V would allow. The car was cumbersome and had a touch less horsepower than the M7; beside him, Blair revved the engine higher before she slowed to a safer highway speed for a moment. He couldn’t see through the combined tint on the windows of both cars, but in a moment it became clear what she had done. The ring of a phone sounded over the speakers, it nearly frightened Toretto out the window.

“Yes?”

“Race you back to the Compound? Winner gets an entire case of Corona?” Like that wasn’t free for the taking all over the mansion. The proposition caused Toretto to smile a Blair-like grin in her direction.

“Fuck yes.” She was gone like lightning - it was all he could do to keep up.


	15. Beware! Criminal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title/Chapter song: Beware! Criminal by Turbonegro
> 
> This is it, the last chapter I wrote eleven years ago. I’m sure I wanted this to go somewhere but more than a decade later I’m happy for Blair and Toretto to ride off into the sunset. Hope you enjoyed!

Toretto nearly panted as he pulled into Blair’s garage behind the redhead in her stolen vehicle. She had given him a run for his money, to be certain - the muscle man felt there had to be an explanation for her two-minute lead other than sheer talent and honed skills. Never before had he been beaten in a race by a woman. Twice! Letty had come close on more than one occasion, but Dominic always managed to keep an ace in the hole in order to get the upper hand at the last second. Apparently, Blair was capable of hiding more aces in her sleeveless shirts than he was. Slightly bitter, the bald man emerged from the car to punch the button on the lift - felt it slowly clatter down the elevator shaft a minute or so behind hers as he came to terms with his defeat.

He even had the better fucking car.

How had she done it? He thought he had her in the race back from Tver, when she had been cut off by an angry semi-truck driver - which left Toretto with a straight shot until the curve of the road which would bring them off the autobahn and into rural Tver. Somehow, in that situation, Blair had shot up past the trucker on the narrow shoulder of the highway in the frighteningly wide Jaguar and took him on the inside lip of that corner, and then had sped down the winding road, taking each divergence from the main roads like a fucking NASCAR driver. It had been all he could do to keep up.

What was her fucking secret?!

Dominic shook himself out of his revelries as the lift clattered to a halt - he lowered himself back into the low-profile M7 and drove it to its customary spot near the room which he now knew housed Blair’s technological Mecca before he proceeded to the Jag. Blair had parked it and disappeared apparently, Toretto thought as he dragged two of the four perfectly door-shaped sheets of two-inch steel toward the work bench beside the car. Each of the door pieces weighted two hundred pounds, or so he guessed, as he slid them across the concrete on a piece of oil-stained towel. Once the four pieces of specially-shaped XJ door bulletproofing was placed conveniently, the burly man began to remove each of the car’s black doors and then disassembled them swiftly.

The click of heels - a telltale sign of Blair’s approach - brought Toretto out of his loss-induced fury of work; she sipped a bottle of Perrier nonchalantly as she clacked her way to Toretto’s side. She set a bottle of normal, non-“sparkling” water next to the door he worked on and smiled brightly.

“You gave me a hell of a run there, Toretto.” His eyes narrowed - even the bandanna couldn’t keep the sweat out of his eyes as he connected the first door (front driver’s door) with its steel plate of a mate. Toretto’s calloused hands guided the two pieces together, and he fastened them to one another with surprising adeptness for one who had only assembled one armored door before in his life. Blair complimented him on this as well, and began to work with a screw driver on the front passenger’s side door.

She found herself unceremoniously shoved out of the way as Toretto furiously unscrewed the paneling, and separated it from the door.

“So you’re angry at me?” She asked, and retrieved another screwdriver to work on the rear driver’s side door. He couldn’t shove her away from that particular workstation - if he seemed too angry it would make her angry, and an angry Blair was not fun to deal with, he had learned.

“Not at you.”

“At yourself for loosing?” Blair gently lifted the “guts” of the Jaguar XJ’s rear driver-side door; she placed them on the diamond-plate workbench beside the door itself. She didn’t ever smoke when she worked on the cars in her garage - especially not while she worked on the ones which were to be sold to the Mafia. She didn’t consider these cars hers, Toretto had noticed - they were just “moving on through.” Blair crawled underneath the worktable with the interior parts of the door Toretto had already finished and began to work on it - parts of the bulletproofing had to be sanded down by delicate hands before the interior and exterior could meet again. She attacked the steel with the hefty belt sander which had been left beneath the table for that specific purpose - when she finally shut the sander off, she realized that the sound of music - Avenged Sevenfold - filled the garage. Kolya and Mikhail were back with their prizes.

The pair had gone off separately - they took a bus to St. Petersburg and stole two separate cars while there. They still had a third to get - Blair and Toretto had been the first successful team of the day - but the group at the garage could only work so fast on what was already there. Kolya had parked the Rolls-Royce he had retrieved on a lift in the corner and worked on removing the wheels.

All of the cars were to meet certain specifications - standards that Blair claimed allowed her to be the top “dealer” of armored cars in Russia, if not all of Europe. The hood and trunk of the cars were to re-enforced with the same steel plates that Toretto connected to the doors, the roof was torn out and re-lined with a sort of Kevlar-like material before the original material was replaced (with a little extra padding in case of impact). A siren control and a PA system were installed into the glove compartment for communication outside of the car, special strobe lights were attached to the front grille and the back bumper of each vehicle, and bright high-beams were added to the headlamps and taillights. Extra padding was added around each window to avoid head injury to the “dignitary” who would ride there, the windows and windshield were replaced with thick, special bullet-proof glass (and if so desired, they were made to move - a hell of a lot of extra work, Toretto decided). Each tire was equipped with run-flat capabilities, and Blair saw to it that each rim was upgraded as standard part of her package. The windows and windshield were all tinted the blackest black, just like each of her personal cars. To order from Blair Hundley was to order the best.

It took three days of work around the clock for the order to be finished; just in time to take a shower and prepare for the delivery, Blair had said. She hadn’t ever stopped for a break herself - the occasional cigarette, bottle of water and trip to the bathroom aside, the redhead hadn’t left the garage in three days.

Freshly showered, she met Toretto in the hallway, dressed in her usual while he was dressed in the suit she had provided him.

“I feel like James fucking Bond.” Toretto grumbled, as Blair fussed over his collar, she straightened it before she fastened the small white buttons at its corners. Very detail oriented.

“You better not act like him, I’m running a business here, not living a movie.” Blair tugged on the hem of her high-waisted skirt, watched as the pleats fell straight and continued down the hallway. “Now, you’re here as my personal bodyguard. You do not speak to the bosses, you simply accompany me. Stay on my right flank.” From the pocket of her sleek black trench coat, Blair pulled an equally as sleek Glock, .45 caliber with a loaded clip and proffered the weapon to Toretto as if she had a distaste for the thing. “I trust you know how to use this, right?”

The burly man quickly slid the gun into his lapel pocket, surprised at how well it fit there; she must have had the pocket specially sized for it. Only she would have thought of such a thing, Toretto thought as he adjusted the jacket across his broad shoulders.

“Come now, cheer up. You’re driving for me.” Blair allowed her hand to skitter across those shoulders after she dropped the keys into his chest pocket. Toretto suppressed a shiver at her touch.

“Why would that be any fun at all,” He murmured as she crawled into the passenger seat of the dark Range Rover and began to tap the coordinates of the meeting point into the GPS tacked to its windshield.

“Let’s go.”

Five hours later the convoy (Blair and Toretto in one SUV, Kolya in another, Mikhail drove the semi-truck filled with heavily armored sedans) was on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine. Neutral territory, Blair had said, neither party was as well known in the Ukraine as they were in Russia; which said something about the mob bosses - The Compound wasn’t known anywhere at all.

“Or perhaps it say something about us,” Blair murmured as she pushed the long red silk back from her eyes. “Keep your eyes open, they should be here already.” No sooner had she spoken than a black Mercedes GL550 pulled alongside the Range Rover and slowly began to guide it to an unknown parking lot. Blair seemed to have no qualms with such a sketchy situation - out of the corner of his eye, Toretto thought he saw her shift a lump between her legs, strange as he didn’t remember that she was in possession of a penis.

“Are you packing?” The question was a strangled cry, as if he hadn’t expected it.

“Are you an idiot?” Blair shot back as she sifted again, this time to slide her signature black heels on her feet. “Just remember to hold your tongue. These guys are rough.” Toretto opened his mouth, as if to say that he knew his way around people like this, but her scathing look silenced him once more. “Very good. Remember, just hover and look tough.”

“James fucking Bond,” Toretto growled again, as he followed Blair over the cobblestones of the parking lot. Her tiny strut was dwarfed by Toretto, Mikhail and Kolya, but made no less potent by their size; the woman stood at 5’8” in those intimidating heels, and she knew how to use every inch of her height.

“Nikolai Baronova, how are you, you dirty bastard?” Her alto accent rung across the courtyard - Toretto gave a start, had she just sworn at the hulking giant of a man who sauntered toward them? The girl had a death wish!

“Blair Hundley, you little bitch! Where are my cars?” The man’s voice was slimy, too high of a pitch to be natural or even accepted.

“Where is my money?”

“Ah, Blair, you really think I’ll give you the money first this time?”

“It was worth a try,” The little Brit smiled wryly, and turned to Kolya and Mikhail to order them about with harsh Russian. Toretto gathered that she had asked the cars be taken out of the truck, but remained at Blair’s right just as she had told him, his arms clasped in front of his body like a bouncer.

As Blair motioned to Kolya and Mikhail, signaling them to begin unloading the armored cars from the heavily-weighted truck, one of Nicolai’s men - bodyguards, Toretto had figured - reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette, and then into his lapel pocket for what Dominic had believed to be a lighter.

Too late, Toretto realized it wasn’t.

However, Blair didn’t seem phased by the presence of the gun, the only notice she seemed to take of the black metal was the raising of one eyebrow. Upon a closer inspection, though, Toretto noticed the tips of the thumb and forefinger of her right hand were pressed tightly together, her nail nearly cutting the skin of her finger. It was all he could do to resist reaching for his own piece when faced with a man with a gun in his face - Toretto didn’t take kindly to getting shot any more than the next guy, he would rather have been the one holding the gun if anyone was.

“What’s the meaning of this, Baronova?” Her voice was cold, and punctuated by silence and the sound of heavy tires crushing the feeble paving stones of the parking lot. Mikhail and Kolya were smart enough to notice the gun and Blair’s stiffened stance and would stop unloading the cars, Toretto hoped for their sake they were. What had Blair been thinking, bringing four into a group of at least five? Did she really think that they weren’t going to bring enough drivers for the cars she had brought plus a few extra for security?

Her face a mask, Blair pondered how long it would take her to reach up her skirt and pull out her piece if Toretto didn’t thaw out and draw his own weapon. The Russians weren’t that stupid, the would definitely notice she wasn’t trying to invite them to her bedroom when she began sticking her hands between her legs, so she would have to persevere.

“We don’t have any money these days, dear Miss Hundley. The market for us here has all but gone south.”

“The market for what, Nikolai? What exactly is the market of the mafia?” She crossed her arms under her breasts as Kolya and Mikhail returned to join Toretto in hovering just behind her short frame, her face hard. Silently, Blair thanked God she had taught the pair so well - they had only gotten one car off the trailer when the gun was pulled and secured the truck once more before they joined her. The four of them could easily get all of her assets out of this damned parking lot if the need be. That was, if none of the four of them were wounded. “I don’t work for free. Did you expect me to?”

Toretto’s brows knit together at the big man’s silence, and slowly - taking his cue from Kolya - reached into the lapel pocket of the suit, his hands gripping the rough handle of the gun as he slowly pulled it from the back material, clasping it in two hands. Kolya and Mikhail were both fixed on the Nikolai character, and accordingly, Toretto focused his sights on the only man with a gun.

“I need the cars, Blair.”

“I need the money, Baronova.”

The man with the gun managed two shots - one which found center mass and one which went wide - before Toretto hit him between the eyes. Coldly, he moved in front of Blair as she crumpled to the ground and managed to get three more shots off, all of which found some sort of limb and two of which were mortal before Nikolai hit the ground, riddled with Kolya’s bullets. Apparently, Mikhail had taken the same route as Toretto, buying the burly American time to scoop up Blair’s frail form.

As Mikhail changed clips to cover the escape, Toretto managed a shout of direction.

“Leave the Jag, take the truck and the SUV, let’s move!”

He unceremoniously threw Blair in the backseat of the Range Rover - the burly man knew she was still breathing, but not much else about her condition - and held the pedal to the floor until they were on the border of the Ukraine and Russia.


End file.
